


ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH

by Mikkeneko



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Ableism, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Anal Sex, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Exhibitionism, F/F, Garrett Hawke apparently, Hawke and Varric are drift compatible, Hawke is utterly unable to be appropriate in company, I am so sorry about Fenris guys, Injury Recovery, M/M, Oral Sex, Pacific Rimjob, Public Display of Affection, Public Nudity, Rimming, also Fenris, chopped liver?, embodied mating rituals, some stories have the Idiot Ball, they all take turns, this story has the Catty Ball, what is Varric, who gets sick of handjobs?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-07 15:05:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 42,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4267833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another day in the Kirkwall Shatterdome, another gargantuan monster forcing its way into their world from beyond the Breach. For Garrett Hawke, Jaeger Pilot, it's all part of the job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Incursion

**Author's Note:**

> Entirely the fault of fauxfires, who knows me too well, and queen-schadenfreude, who is a terrible enabler.
> 
> This fic comes pre-loaded with art: [Hawke and Varric in the cockpit and Anders and Aveline in the control booth,](http://queen-schadenfreude.tumblr.com/post/122681710263/me-give-me-something-to-draw-in-mspaint-im-drunk) by queen-shadenfreude, and [Kirkwall Champion,](http://queen-schadenfreude.tumblr.com/post/122720289723/baar-ur-baar-ur-design-your-own-jaeger-movie) by baar-ur.

Alarms were just part of life at Kirkwall Shatterdome; not a day went by without at least one klaxon blaring in the background of the cavernous, concrete-lined labyrinth. Anyone staying there for any length of time had to learn to identify what alarm went what by the tone, the volume, and the part of the base it was sounding off from, so they'd know whether they could go back to bed or scramble for their lives.

Which was why  _this_  alarm made all four of the figures deeply involved with a ferocious game of Wicked Grace (no money; betting for chores only) stop what they were doing and look up intently, heads cocked like a hunting dog that heard the horns blowing to start the chase.

"That's definitely an incursion," Sebastian remarked, scraping one nail nervously against the edge of his cards. "Who do you think they'll send?"

"Not you; Fenris is laid up in the infirmary with a broken foot for at least another week," Hawke told Sebastian, who pulled a rueful face of agreement. He turned to the next member of their foursome, a dark-haired beauty who handled her cards like she'd been born with a deck in her hands. "And not you or Merrill either; Nature's Fury is still in drydock for repairs."

"Some people get all the fun," Isabela said with a pout.

"Guess it'll be either you or me, Hawke," said the fourth player with a rueful, self-deprecating smile. "And let's be honest, that means it'll probably be you. Your track record is much better than the Guard Captain's."

"That's just because you and Aveline haven't been in the game long enough," Hawke said generously. "You're still finding your feet together; your kill ratio will improve with enough kills to your name."

"I hope you're right; I know I can't really compare to Aveline's first..." Donnic began, but was cut off when the alarm klaxon suddenly silenced with a final raucous whoop.

The PA system crackled with a whitewash of static, and then with a voice; "Kirkwall Champion pilots, report for duty in the hangar immediately. Kirkwall Champion pilots, report for duty in the hangar immediately..."

Hawke let out a whoop of his own as he jumped to his feet, throwing his hand of cards down onto to the table. "Hear that, Isabela?" he cried. "Kirkwall Champions ride again!"

"Stealing all our kills," Isabela bemoaned. "Bring me back something shiny, will you?"

Hawke grinned, even as he quickly gathered his kit back up around him; even when he was technically off-duty, he never let it stray far. "I'll bring you back some radioactive kaiju balls, how does that sound?"

"Oh, Hawke," Isabela said with an exaggerated sigh and flutter of her thick eyelashes. "You  _do_  know how to treat a lady. And here I thought you'd get all out of practice."

Donnic coughed, and Sebastian flushed a deep red; Hawke laughed over his shoulder as he dashed towards the doors.

The hallways were thronged with hurrying Shatterdome personnel, though not as many as there could have been; as ear-shattering as the alarm was, it was still one of the lesser ones, not an all-hands at stations call. That alone told Hawke a lot about what he could expect to face; nothing they hadn't faced, and thoroughly curb-stomped before.

Still, it didn't do to get careless. _Never turn your back on the Breach,_ the older pilots said - at least, the ones who had lived long enough to become older.  _There's always another surprise._

Hawke had moved quickly, and the other Jaeger Wardens melted out of his path as soon as they saw his face - still, by the time he got to the hangar, his co-pilot was already there, already ensconced in the cockpit and being hooked up to the neural harness. "What took you so long, Hawke?" Varric yelled out, to laughter and hoots of agreement from the other Wardens. "I've been cooling my heels in here waiting for your slow arse to show up!"

"Hey!" Hawke threw himself into a lift, pounding on the cables as though that would make them lift him faster. "Not everyone spends all their time in a Jaeger's cockpit just waiting for things to blow up, y'know. Some of us have lives!"

Varric barked out a laugh. "Ha! Not you, Hawke," he said. "You live for killing Kaiju and we both know it."

The lift finally arrived at the level of the cockpit, and Hawke slid off it into the heart of the great machine, hastily stowing his gear on the hooks and lockers provided for that purpose. "Won't argue with you there, old man," he said, flashing Varric a grin. "In fact, I think I'm ahead by one."

"No way, I'm definitely up one on you!" Varric scoffed.

It was an old joke, and Hawke grinned more from exhilaration and nerves than any real humor as he stepped into his place in the harness and waited for the techs to hook him up. Of course, neither of them could actually be ahead of the other, since all of their kills had been as a team; but the easy banter helped to get the Drift flowing between them.

Varric wasn't wrong about Hawke's passion for killing kaiju. He'd always wanted to be a pilot, ever since the Jaegers were first commissioned and the Jaeger Wardens formed to support them; Hawke had only been a teenager then, but he'd dreamed and trained and plotted for the moment with every testosterone-laced fiber of his being. Seen himself inside a Jaeger cockpit, just like he was now, with  _his_  mind and body driving the behemoths into battle in tandem with his partner.

But that had been before the kaiju had made landfall at Lothering, where Hawke's family had been sheltering; before the kaiju's claw had descended on Bethany, his baby sister, before the kaiju had torn his family apart for ever.

After that, it had been personal.

He and Carver had made their way to the Shatterdome together, determined to make it as pilots - everyone said that siblings made the best pilots, after all, had the most shared memories and best chance of compatibility in the Drift.

Or at least that was what the recruitment posters said - the reality failed to live up to the dream. He and Carver, the technicians told them in no uncertain terms, were not Drift compatible. At all.

And that would have been that - the two of them resigned to living out the days of the war in the barracks with the other failed hopefuls. But that night, Hawke had gone in a foul temper to the canteen and proceeded to get spectacularly drunk, and then spectacularly in trouble with a pair of ex-Wardens in the bar and set off a truly magnificent bar fight. At the other end of the bar had been Varric, drowning his own sorrows; he'd made a valiant effort to stay above the fray until a bar stool had smashed over his head. His head won.

So had Varric and Hawke.

The next day they'd presented themselves as pilot-candidates again, and  _this_  time the Drift compatibility score had been stunning. They'd been in pilot training by the end of the day, and fitted for neural harnesses by the end of the week. Their first chance at battle had come less than a month later - the kaiju Deepstalker making landing at Amaranthine - and Hawke had never looked back.

"Left hemisphere on-line," the computerized voice sang in his ear, drawing him out of the stream of memories that always came with the Drift. "Right hemisphere on-line. Neural handshake complete."

Hawke breathed again, feeling as always the strange echo to the breath that came when in the harness, before he and Varric had quite synched up their biorhythms. He keyed up his headset mic. "What have we got today, Warden-Commander?" he asked.

The deep voice of Warden-Commander Cousland cut across the channels, sounding calm and measured and authoritative as ever. "We have an incursion out by the Awakening Sea, on a coastal shelf south of the Breach," he said. "Aveline and Donnic will be your backup, should you need it; the others will stand by to defend the base. Are you prepared?"

"Aye aye, Commander!" Varric said snappily.

Hawke held off for a moment. "Depends, is my boy in the booth yet?" he called out, keying his mic down to the combat channel. "Anders! Are you there?"

There was a rustle of static, and then a warm, familiar voice came over his headset. "I'm here, Garrett," he said. "As always."

Hawke couldn't stop the stupid grin that spread across his face as the words sank in. "Then I'm ready for anything," he announced. "Kaiju can eat my shiny metal ass!"

"Mm, do be careful, love," Anders said, his volume dropping to a deep purr. "Don't do anything reckless out in the field today, or I'll have to find someone else to eat out my ass later tonight. Nobody else's dick is quite like yours, love, so keep it all in one piece and come home safe, all right?"

Hawke felt the flush rising in his cheeks, but he couldn't stop grinning; at least, not until another familiar voice coughed uncomfortably in his ear. "Anders," Aveline said in a strained tone of voice, "you do realize that your mic is set to broadcast to the whole base and not just to Hawke's headset..."

The channel burst out into raucous laughter, and Hawke joined in uproariously, imagining the look on Anders' face when he realized he'd been caught out. "All right!" he said, cutting over the jeers and teasing that were certain to follow. "Let's get this show on the road. Talk kaiju to me, Anders."

Anders cleared his throat, then again before he managed to return his voice to its normal tone. "It looks like a Category Three, code name 'Varterral,' " he said.

Hawke heard another voice muffled in the background behind Anders, not over the channel. "Honestly, how do you come up with these names," it said.

"Because that's what it  _is,"_ Anders replied irritably, then launched further into his explanation. "We're getting some chemical traces off its saliva that look bad. Don't let it spit on you. Aside from that, just watch out for the legs."

"The legs?" Hawke said, somewhat puzzled. Usually, teeth and claws and horrible stinging quills were a bigger problem than legs.

They had spent the whole conversation slogging across the rocky coast north of the Awakening Sea, their huge stride eating up the distance. They slowed as they entered the water, heavy surf pounding over the metal legs, as they approached the blip on their maps that marked INCURSION.

At first it was just a colorless lump bobbing in the surf above the coastal shelf, too small and distant to even make out its form. As they approached, it seemed to catch wind of them, and turned to charge in their direction. Water sloughed off around it in churning whirlpools as it rose from the surf; a blotchy, mottled-gray hide over its head and back, with a queer pale orange light glowing off its underbelly.

Its head - at least, Hawke guessed it was the head, it was on the forward end of the beast and it was at least vaguely head-shaped - split open horizontally, revealing a ghastly greenish light framed by rows and rows of razor-sharp incisors. It screamed in horrific defiance, grayish flesh bunching and shuffling as it rose from the water... and rose... and  _rose..._

"Oh," Hawke said as it reached its full height, towering over them like a massive jumping spider, hissing and raining toxic spittle from far above. It had at least four pairs of limbs that he could see from this angle - some thick and knotted like tree trunks, bearing its massive weight, others thin and spindly and twitching in a nervous, worrying fashion. " _Those_ legs."

"Holy shit!" Varric swore from beside him.

Hawke could only agree. "It's like a praying mantis fucked a spider and had a baby," he said. "A giant, acid-spitting monster baby. That's also a bear."

"That thing's got to be taller than Drakon Tower!" Varric continued. "How is  _that_ only a cat-three?"

"Because it may be tall but it hasn't got all that much mass," Anders answered his (probably rhetorical) question. "Those legs are going to be pretty spindly. Break a few of those, and you'll bring the rest of it down within reach."

"Oh, is that all?" Varric said, heavy with sarcasm. Hawke only grinned.

"Sounds like a plan," he said. "Let's do it."

The first part of the fight could only be described as nerve-wracking. Varterral moved fast for something its size, and the thick dragging waters on the coastal shelf inhibited Kirkwall Champion's movement much more than the tall, spindly kaiju. Two thousand tons of metal and wires, the Jaegers had never been particularly delicate instruments, but they'd never felt so clumsy as they did now. They had to stay on edge, every nerve singing, waiting for the right moment to push their Jaeger to the left or the right to avoid a flying gob of corrosive spittle. After seeing the way the water churned and bubbled when it came into contact, and the rapidity with which a nearby rock had been reduced below the waterline, they had no desire to come into contact with it themselves.

Their only saving grace was that the Varterral blatantly telegraphed its movements; it was always obvious where it was aiming to spit next, and only a few minutes of narrow escapes taught them the range of motion on its swinging legs. They were more like mandibles than legs, Hawke thought, and felt Varric agreed; lined on one edge with ugly sawtooth protrusions and ending in cruel barbed hooks.

One of those legs came whistling in towards them from the left side, but Hawke was ready for it; he dodged the swing and then caught it, gripping the insectoid protrusion between the two huge metal gauntlets of the Jaeger. For a moment, monster and machine pushed back equally against each other - then Hawke found the right leverage and  _shoved,_  and the spindly leg snapped clean off in his hand.

The kaiju reared back with a hideous shriek, one that made their ears ring even with the muffling protection of the suit around them. The severed end of the limb flailed wildly through the air, and acid spittle sprayed widely into the air and fell in a gentle rain all around them. They could feel the soft pinging and hissing as even the small drops began to eat their way into the metal skin, and had to scoot to get Kirkwall Champion out of range.

Staying in close range to any of the legs was nearly impossible - the kaiju moved them too quickly, and the acid spit made it too dangerous to stay in one spot too long - so they fell back on ranged weapons. Varric was mostly dominant here, although they were still both in sync, and Hawke fell back and let Varric's thoughts race through and around and over him in the Drift. Memories of his childhood in Orzrammar, his mother and brother, the long march in exile. Memories of one shooting range after another, each one blending into another, rifle becoming shotgun becoming handgun in their hands as all their focus narrowed down to the target.

The kaiju screamed and staggered as smoking craters peppered its head, underbelly, and the strangely delicate joints of its legs. Varric didn't shoot wildly or blindly, and he didn't waste ammunition; every shot went precisely where he wanted it to, and every shot hit somewhere that hurt. It was half of what made Kirkwall Champion so effective at their job; between Varric's accuracy and his stingy conservation of ammunition, they could keep up their rate of fire for a long, long time.

Varterral began to limp and stagger as one spindly leg was blown to a smoking ruin, then a second one; it began to sway dangerously on its remaining legs and Kirkwall Champion followed up, harrying the kaiju remorselessly with a barrage of shots to its beaklike head, and blows to its remaining wobbling legs. The creature let out a shriek of agony and hatred, lashing out with its remaining limbs; they dodged, and the motion left the kaiju scrambling and unbalanced.

Seeing the opportunity, they darted in and sliced one of their blades across the bulging, monstrous tendons. Spurting viscous blue blood, the leg buckled - but a spasm knocked Kirkwall Champion back, and their heel caught in a hidden fissure the kaiju's claws had dug in the ocean floor. The Jaeger lurched, the pilots fighting to keep the machine upright even as they struggled to free themselves from the unexpected obstacle. "Shit!" Hawke yelled.

"Champion, move!" Aveline's voice crackled urgently over their comm. "It's about to spit again!"

"Trying!" Varric grunted back over the mike, and put a firm stop to their panicked thrashing. They reached down to brace their gauntlets against an underwater outcrop of stone, and with the new leverage, heaved -

Newly freed, they stumbled to the side, but not quite fast enough to avoid the steaming gob of corrosive acid that the kaiju flung vengefully down on their position. Half of it missed them entirely, splashing down into the water beyond them, but the rest of the acid caught on the Jaeger's right shoulder, trickling down the outside of the arm. A gentle hiss built quickly into a stuttering, grinding groan as the metal skin of the Jaeger writhed under the assault, the edges curling back from the hole being eaten into the interior of the suit, and Hawke flung them both with a splash into the saltwater in hopes of quenching the acid's bite.

Alarms sounded all around him, damage reports and environmental hazard reports, and both pilots staggered and struggled to regain their feet. But over everything Hawke heard one voice, high and panicked over his headset.

"They're hit!" Anders yelled. "Oh, Maker, they're down! Garrett! Garrett, are you all right?"

"I'm fine!" Hawke yelled back, wrenching the Jaeger back upright and into fighting position. He swung around dizzily, strafing the suit's cameras until he could get a fix back on their enemy. "It didn't hit anything vital."

"Oh, thank Andraste," Anders breathed.

"I'm fine too, thanks for asking," Varric said testily over the comm. "But the coolant line to the arm cannon is fucked. I can't shoot again without having it overheat and probably blow up in our face."

"Harren and his boys are going to have a grand time patching that up later, though," Hawke said cheekily.

"Clear the channel," Aveline growled over the headset. "No more chatter. Focus! The kaiju is still active and your Jaeger's integrity is compromised!"

"I told you, we're fine," Hawke countered. It was only the one arm that was compromised; the legs and body of the machine still worked fine. They pushed the Jaeger through the pounding surf, towards the seething boil of water that marked where the kaiju had fallen. The monster was still alive, still shrieking malice and defiance, but its spindly legs lay in shattered ruins; it wouldn't be getting up any time again. "And... Varterral is down! Let's finish this!"

"Over to you now, Hawke," Varric called out, and faded back into the Drift.

Where Varric excelled at ranged combat, Hawke was in his element once Kirkwall Champion got into close quarters. Varric hung back, Drifting, as all of Hawke's memories of every brutal fight he'd ever been in rushed forward. The meaty thump of flesh on flesh, the muffled crunch of breaking bone, the leverage of limb against limb - every kata, every punching bag, every back-alley brawl he'd started - and finished - since he was still a child rushed forward, and Hawke brought their fist down on Varterral's head with a thunderous  _crack._

The kaiju screamed and flailed, trying to throw them back, but Hawke hung grimly on. Anders had been right about its size; now that it was down to their level, the eerie elongated legs out of the picture, it wasn't much bigger than Kirkwall Champion itself. But while the legs had been - relatively - fragile and breakable, the thing's body was a tougher nut to crack.

Varterral had six eyes, set in a half-circle around its head; three of them were burst and blind from Varric's sniper-precise shots earlier, and the other three rolled beadily at them as the remaining mandible-legs clawed towards them. Hawke managed to get their damaged arm around its neck and locked on, giving them an anchor when the kaiju tried to shake them off like a dog ridding itself of water, and stabbed downward behind the neck.

The blade ground against armored plate, stuck, and slid off the side; even with all of the Jaeger's strength behind it, the armor was just too thick. The kaiju screamed indignation at the attempt, and snapped its razed-lined beak at their chest. Hawke moved quickly to block, and the teeth snagged for a moment on the Jaeger's arm; before it could bite through multiple layers of titanium-reinforced plate, he keyed on the blast-flamethrower built into the kaiju's arm.

The flame-gun had only a short range, and the engineers had originally wanted to remove it from Kirkwall Champion's arsenal entirely, but Hawke had argued them down. He had  _also_  argued them into modifying the barrel to resemble the head and gaping jaws of a metal dragon, which had taken a half-hour monologue on its benefit for crew morale and on the importance of proper imaging for Hawke to be able to correctly manage the weapon as part of the neural interface before they gave in; mostly, Hawke suspected, just to shut him up.

The dragon's head roared, and a searing blue-white blast of flame shot forth into the kaiju's mouth. Teeth charred and crumbled, the edges of the beak blackened, and Varterral screamed in agony as it cringed backwards. Hawke followed the movement, still firing, and the inferno washed over the kaiju's head to blacken its three remaining eyes.

Kirkwall Champion readied for a counter-blow, but there was no need - the kaiju slid back into the water with a enormous splash, keening in bewildered agony. Thrashing around in the shallow water, blind, bleeding and broken - Varric almost felt sorry for the thing.

Hawke remembered a collapsing roof, a descending claw, and a bloody smear on the concrete floor, and he didn't.

"Got one more shot in you, Varric?" Hawke asked as they strode forward, digging hard metal fingers into the kaiju's neck.

"Enough juice left for this," Varric replied.

Together, they forced open the dying Varterral's mouth, and unloaded their guns down its vulnerable throat.

* * *

 

Cheers rang out over the comm as they slogged back to shore, encumbered by the dragging corpse of the kaiju. Ugly and toxic as they were, the bodies were too valuable to be left to rot in the middle of the ocean; the cleanup crews could scavenge much of use from their virulently chemically active hides, and the R&D teams were ever hungry for new specimens to dissect. They brought it as far as a nearby empty beach and dumped it there, so as not to spread its radioactive blood to any inhabited regions, and jogged double-time back to the Kirkwall Shattedome.

Hawke jittered in his harness, all the more the closer they got to the base, until by the time they actually clanked their way into the hangar he was nearly thrumming with impatience. Varric bore it with a weary tolerance born of long practice.

Almost the moment the Jaeger settled into the dock, and the computer's voice announced that the neural link was powering down, Hawke nearly ripped himself out of the harness and began to shimmy out of the piloting suit. Varric looked away with an exaggerated groan, having seen this spectacle too many times; by the time the cockpit doors ground open, Hawke was doffing the last piece of his gear except for his boots. He leapt out onto the open hatchway stark naked, thrust his fists in the air, and roared "I AM THE CHAMPION OF KIRKWAAAAAAALL!"

"Nice to know I'm just chopped liver," Varric remarked from inside the cockpit, but Hawke ignored him; he leapt from the Jaeger to the hangar floor without waiting for the lift to crank slowly up, and dashed off through the hangar to a chorus of mocking whistles and dismayed groans. As much fun as it was to pilot the metal suit he needed to be out, he needed to move, to be free - needed the reminder that he was a human, in a human body, and nothing more.

Of course, that was only part of the reason for him streaking the base; mostly he just liked seeing how far he could push the limits of the base crew's tolerance for erratic, eccentric behavior on the part of a Jaeger pilot. He'd heard some truly crazy stories of the Jaeger pilots who had come before him, and he was determined to top them in at least  _some_  way before he was through.

Nor was that all he meant to top. Hawke skidded around a turn, palm stinging from the rough metal doorway he'd used as a brake, and took the steps to the control room three at a time. It was a controlled bustle of chaos, as usual, but Hawke only had eyes for one person: down at the end of the bank of machines, headset still perched over his ears, was a strawberry-blond man in a white button-down shirt.

The  _third_  reason he so enjoyed doing this.

Anders was laughing, covering his mouth with his hands, and beet-red with mortification at the same time. As Hawke approached, wearing nothing but a grin and a swagger, his eyes traveled involuntarily down Hawke's body from head to foot before he clapped one hand over his roving eyes and let the laughter escape. "Oh, Garrett," he gasped out, between helpless laughter. "Oh, Maker. Not again. What am I going to do with you?"

Hawke struck a pose, hands on hips, and waggled his eyebrows at Anders outrageously. "Mm. What  _are_  you going to do with me?" he said, leering. "Will it take all night? It just so happens that my calendar's clear after saving the world..."

"It would be nice if it involved clothes!" Aveline called from the next station over, in a disgusted voice. Anders clapped his hand back over his mouth, unable to hold back the whinney of laughter.

"Indeed it would," spoke a deep, measured voice from behind him; Hawke had to take a moment to control his expression before he turned around, acting casual like he reported to his Commander in the nude all the time. Which, to be fair, he did.

Warden-Commander Cousland stood in the center of the control room, chaos parting around him, and the only sign of discomfiture was a quirk of his lips that he couldn't quite smooth out. "Well done out there today, Kirkwall Champion," he said, speaking also through his own headset to Varric, still back in the Jaeger cockpit. "We can expect no less of the Hawke-Varric team. But, I admit I would expect a little more in the way of professional decorum."

"Really?" Hawke raised his eyebrows. "Have you even  _met_  me?"

Cousland shook his head. "Get dressed, Pilot," he said firmly. "Come to my office for a full debriefing.  _Then_  you can take the rest of the day off."

Only Cousland could have said that with a straight face to a naked man without the slightest hint of either embarrassment or innuendo. Hawke was still working on a good play on words involving 'debriefing' when there was a cough behind him, and a gentle hand tugging at his elbow.

"Come on, love," Anders said, pulling him around. He was holding out a pile of fabric - Hawke recognized the pieces from his own wardrobe, Anders must have brought the change of clothes with him to his post as soon as the incursion alarm sounded. Hawke couldn't help but chuckle ruefully as he accepted the clothes and the hint.

At least when he had pulled on a pair of pants and a shirt, Anders rewarded him with a kiss - deep and thorough, full of Anders' passion and his frustrated worry. "I saw you go down out there earlier," Anders whispered, when they parted for a moment for air; his hands, hooked around Hawke's low back under the loose sweatshirt, clenched for a moment with remembered fear. "I thought I'd lost you."

"Who, me?" Hawke scoffed. "It'll take more than a spindly cat-three to take down the Champion of Kirkwall."

"I'm not doubting you, love," Anders assured him. "It's just - never turn your back on the Breach. There's always another surprise waiting."

"I'm not worried," Hawke said. "Not as long as I know you've got my back."

Anders' eyes softened, and he leaned in for another kiss. He brushed his fingers lightly over the front of Hawke's shirt, threaded his fingers through the gaps left by buttons all mismatched to the wrong holes from Hawke's hasty dressing. Hawke pulled him close, rubbing up flush against his lover's body, until a hoot from one of the other technicians in the control room brought them out of their reverie. "Hey, pilot!" he yelled out. "Party in the canteen at nineteen hundred! You gonna be there? Or are you gonna be  _occupied?"_

"Hey, I'll have you know I'm the one doing the occupying," Hawke yelled back over his shoulder; Anders groaned and buried his face against Hawke's neck, skin heating to incandescent red again. "But yeah, we'll be there!"

"Wouldn't want to miss your party," Anders murmured, regretfully taking a step back and let his hands slide down to Hawke's forearm. Hawke stopped him before the could lose contact entirely, taking Anders' hand in his and raising it to kiss the palm.

"Can't deprive them of the man of the hour, you know," he replied.

"What is Varric, chopped liver?" Anders said with a laugh.

Hawke sighed regretfully. "I should go meet with the Commander before the party gets started," he said. "But we'll pick this up again tonight?"

"It's a date," Anders promised him.

* * *

 

~ tbc...

 


	2. Celebration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Kirkwall Crew throws a hell of a party, until someone inevitably puts their foot in it. At least nothing exploded... yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What was initially meant to be chapter 2 of 3 turned out too long, so I broke it in half; the second half should come out within a few days.
> 
> Bonus art for this chapter: [The pilots of Freedom's Call!](http://kinloch-ho.tumblr.com/post/132897508144/look-she-said-how-much-do-you-know-about-what)

By the time Hawke got out of the debriefing with Cousland, the party had already gotten started; he heard the echoes of the muffled bass rhythm from a floor away. All the post-Kaiju kill parties were held in the H-M block pilot's lounge, where they had a dimmer for the fluorescents and piped in staticky, low-grade music over the PA system.

Aside from that, there wasn't really much in the way of luxuries in Kirkwall Shatterdome to whip out for parties - the food was the same terrible food it always was, and the booze was the same terrible booze, although there was at least more of it. It was up to them to make the atmosphere a party one, and they did their best; every pilot on base was invited, as well as however much of the support staff was invited and could cram into the lounge.

Varric was already well established in his habitual seat; the seam-burst armchair under the tiny television screen, flanked by rows of vinyl couches. He spotted Hawke as soon as he walked in, and raised a pewter mug to him with a joyful call. "Hey, Hawke! Man of the hour!"

"Look alive, people!" Hawke called out as he swaggered into the lounge. "This is a Hawke party now!"

"Can't be," somebody jeered from the back of the crowd. "The Shatterdome's not on fire and nobody's naked."

"Yet!" someone else yelled, and Varric laughed.

"I've been saving you a drink," Varric said. "Come on, kill it like Varterral!"

This prospect was met by cheers and raucous catcalling on the part of the party guests, so Hawke put a swing in his step as he walked across the lounge to claim the oversized mug Varric pushed down the table towards him. For the look of things he picked it up, struck a pose, and then downed the entire thing in one go.

It was half again the size of the normal tankards, and Hawke was already beginning to feel a bit full in the face by the time he reached the bottom of it; but he had an image to keep up, so he downed the last drop and threw his head back with a gasp, shaking the empty mug upside down in proof. The cheering from the rest of the lounge redoubled, and Hawke took a bow.

"Garrett?" Straightening up, he glanced around until he saw Anders waving him from the end of one of the couches; there was an empty space beside him, which Hawke cheerfully claimed after collecting two more drinks. Anders immediately cuddled up against his side, and Hawke enjoyed a thorough haven't-seen-you-in-two-hours-welcome-back snog before he settled back against the cushions.

Anders leaned away from him and craned his neck, looking Hawke up and down. Hawke grinned. "What are you doing?" he said.

"Checking for grill marks," Anders said.

Hawke laughed. "Ha, as if the Commander would have anything bad to say about me," he said. "I'm awesome."

Anders gave him a pinch to his ribs that made him jump, but then followed it up with an apology kiss. "Awesomely hubristic, you mean," he said.

"Yeah, that does sound like me," Hawke agreed, and then tilted his head back to look around the room. "Looks like the party's really getting started."

Though the night was yet young, the party had already shaken down into the usual little groups; the open space near the kitchenette had been converted into an impromptu dance floor. It had been claimed mostly by the younger base personnel with more energy to burn after a stressful day, but also by Aveline and Donnic, who were standing in a close embrace in the corner slow-dancing (in all defiance of the actual music.)

The kitchenette itself now sported a modest snack bar; Hawke was somewhat surprised to spy Sten lurking over by the edge of the kitchenette, since the stoic giant rarely left the Commander's side. But the lieutenant's presence became clear once he saw the package of highly rationed, highly coveted shortbread cookies being passed around - Sten's voracious sweet tooth was often joked to be the only way they could tell him apart from the Jaegers.

The seats nearest to the counter had also been colonized as a cocktail station; Isabela was mixing drinks, Hawke didn't even want to know with what. All the usual suspects were crowded into that area as well - Merrill, flushed and giggling after only one glass of something pink and bubbling, Oghren knocking back whiskey like water, and Fenris with his crutches leaning up on the barstool beside him.

"I have a feeling the party got started sooner for some of us than others," Anders commented, eyeing Fenris without favor. Although Fenris only had one empty cup on the bar beside him and another in his hands, he already looked well on his way to being thoroughly smashed. Sebastian was hovering nearby, as usual, and his faint expression of worry was always a reliable barometer as to Fenris' state of inebriation. "Maker, how many did he have before he even bothered to come down here?"

Hawke shook his head. "You know he can't tolerate opiates, love," he said. Due to its relatively easy and inexpensive production process, morphine was pretty much the only painkiller they had available to them on the base; after that, it was back to the old 'a shot of gin for the pain' methods. Or, in Fenris' case, a whole bottle of gin. Or two.

Anders pursed his lips disapprovingly. "I don't know why the Warden-Commander puts up with it," he said.

"As long as he keeps it out of the cockpit, Cousland won't interfere," Hawke replied. "Whatever gets him through the day, just like the rest of us."

Hawke didn't know Fenris' story - Fenris' transfer from the Minrathous Shatterdome well predated Hawke's arrival in Kirkwall, and they weren't exactly close enough friends for Fenris to share all his secrets. Most of the rest of his history was buried under a patient confidentiality seal in the infirmary records - but some signs lingered, like the tattoo scars that ran over Fenris' arms, and neck, and face. Rumor had it that the designs had been tattooed on his skin with kaiju blood, although how they'd managed to neutralize it thoroughly enough not to kill him on contact Hawke had no idea.

Whatever they had been, on arriving at Kirkwall Fenris had gone to considerable effort and discomfort to get the tattoos surgically removed - but even their erasure left a fine filigree of pale scars in the places they used to be, white lines highlighted against his dusky skin. That, combined with his habit of self-medication, were the only outward evidence of whatever had happened to him in Minrathous.

"All right, everyone!" Varric yelled out, climbing up on top of the table and holding up his hands to get the attention of the room. Obligingly, even the staticky music turned down to a low muffled thumping. "Now, I know that everyone in this room by now has gotten at least one drink - with the exception of our resident teetotallers, here," Varric bowed quickly towards Sebastian, and then Anders. "You do realize that by abstaining, you've basically designated yourselves emergency backup drivers? If a kaiju attacks while we're all in here drunk, the two of you are going to have to get in a Jaeger together and go fight it."

Laughter filled the room in response to this pronouncement. Sebastian chuckled wryly, though Anders only twisted uncomfortably in Hawke's arms. Varric went on. "So while we've still got the booze to do it with, I'd like to propose a toast!"

He held his own ceramic mug up towards the ceiling, and for a moment his wide smiling features grew serious. "It's easy to get used to this life, this constant struggle," he began, into a suddenly quiet room. "It's easy to fall into the rhythm of the job and think of it as just another day job, something to fill the hours and bring home a paycheck. It's easy to get to comparing one of those monsters against each other, and begin to think that they're not such a big deal at all. It's easy to get to thinking that a kaiju like Varterral is "only" a Category Three, and that means it's small or weak or not worth our time.

"But let's never forget that even a "minor" monster like Varterral, if it were allowed to have its way, will mean the death of thousands - even millions - of people. Let's not forget that they don't stop, they don't  _ever_  stop, until one of our Jaegers puts them down. Let us remember that every - single - one of these kaiju could mean the end of the world as we know it, the end of life for millions of people - if not for what we do here.

"And let's not forget that it takes every one of us here to make that possible. Not just the Jaeger pilots - handsome as we are - " this earned a laugh, and Varric bowed again as Hawke pumped enthusiastically in the air - "But the mechanics, and the scientists, and the booth bunnies, and the administrators, and the cooks, and yes, even the fucking janitors, every single one of us plays a part in keeping the Shatterdome running and these monsters off our shores. So let's all drink up, because today we saved the world. Again!"

Varric climbed down off the table to general claps, hoots, and plastic cups raised high and sloshing in salute. "Even if we could have all done without the unsolicited sneak peek into Hawke's sex life," Aveline called out dryly, even as she applauded Varric's speech. Anders buried his face against the side of Hawke's neck, skin heating with another luminescent blush.

"Speak for yourselves!" Isabela yelled out in response, nuzzling up against Merrill who had somehow migrated into her lap. "I for one thought it added color to an otherwise very dry broadcast."

Aveline snorted. "I just feel sorry for Varric, having to Drift with him," she said. "I'm sure he gets a head full more of Hawke's sex life than anyone else needs to see."

"Hey, I'll have you know that there's nothing about my sex life that's a trial to live through," Hawke objected, crumpling an empty plastic cup and tossing it in Aveline's direction. Throwing it with his left hand it went wide, since his right was still pinned between Anders and the back of the couch.

"I can't help but being concerned, however," Sebastian said to Varric. "I mean, it's easy to joke about, but it can't be easy for you, can it?"

"How do you mean?" Varric asked, taking a long pull on his drink.

"You know... being forced to witness Hawke's... sexual acts, with you being... as the Maker made you," Sebastian stammered slightly, gesturing to Varric.

Varric's eyebrows rose in disbelief, and Sebastian's complexion flushed a little darker. Varric took another drink, then chuckled. "Choir boy, I don't know where you've been getting your information," he said, "but the 'a' doesn't actually stand for 'allergic.' It's not like wolfsbane - I'm not going to shrivel up and die from being exposed to other people bumping uglies. Personally, I don't find the two-man tango to be worth my time and effort, but if Hawke and Blondie do? Hey, more power to them."

"I, ah... I apologize for assuming..." Sebastian started, but Varric waved him off with a 'don't worry about it' gesture.

"I just remind myself that it could have been worse," Varric said, raising his voice above the general laughter. "If I ever start feeling sorry for myself I just stop and think: I could have wound up partnered with Bartrand, listening in on HIS sex life!"

The lounge rang with laughter; Varric really knew how to work a crowd. He'd be auditioning for the role of Warden-Commander next, Hawke thought with fond amusement.

"Speaking of brothers," Donnic said when the hubbub began to die down. "Is Carver not joining us tonight?"

That put a damper on Hawke's good mood, and he scowled. "No. He's out with the salvaging crew," he said, trying not to sound too petulant. "Frying his nuts off with radioactive kaiju blood and destroying the possibility of at least  _one_  of us carrying on the family name someday."

"You don't approve?" Donnic sounded surprised. "It's important work."

"It's stupid work is what it is," Hawke argued back. As the family member of a Jaeger pilot, Carver could have lived in (definite) safety and (relative) comfort on the base as long as he wanted without ever having to wade hip-deep through kaiju entrails. "He doesn't have to go out there and get his face chewed off by kaiju lice, but he does it anyway. Risking his fool neck -"

Another pinch to his ribs interrupted him; Anders had apparently gotten over his terminal case of embarrassment. "I'm sorry to say it, love," Anders said, sounding not at all sorry to say it. "But you are a  _howling_  hypocrite."

"Look, anyone could do salvaging -" Hawke started.

"But not just anyone would," Merrill chimed in; she'd been puttering about the lounge, picking up discarded cups and stacking them neatly for re-use. "I think it's pretty brave of him, don't you?"

That gave Hawke pause. "That's not the point," he said at last, sulkily. "It would have been different if we'd been pilots together. Pilots can't be spared, there aren't enough of them -"

A harsh laugh interrupted him, and Hawke began to wonder if anyone was planning to let him finish a sentence tonight. "Oh, Maker spare us from the prospect of a Hawke and Hawke sibling pilot team," Fenris called out from his perch at the bar. "It's bad enough with Varric along to temper just  _one_  of your fool recklessness."

"Excuse me?" Anders demanded indignantly. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means what I said," Fenris said with a sneer. "Hawke is a disaster in the cockpit, who half the time ends up destroying whatever town he's gone out to save."

"Ooh, are you boys going to fight?" Isabela purred from the sidelines. "Will there be nude wrestling involved? I brought oil. C'mon, fight!"

Hawke scoffed. While there was a grain of truth in Fenris' accusations, it wasn't like Andraste's Fist was any better - some amount of collateral damage was just par for the course in any Jaeger-Kaiju battle. They tried to keep the battle sites away from habitable areas when they could, but the fact was that a little localized damage and a dead kaiju was far preferable to the massive damage that could result from a kaiju running unchecked, and Fenris knew this perfectly well.

Fenris was just being Fenris; he took the business of fighting kaiju even more personally than Hawke did. The two of them had something of a friendly rivalry going on - at least, Hawke liked to think it was friendly - since Kirkwall Champion and Andraste's Fist were the two newest, largest and best-armed of the Jaegers present at the Shatterdome. If anything, Andraste's Fist had the edge in hardware, equipped with a new and experimental phase-punch engine that let them rip through Kaiju armor like tissue paper (if only for a few seconds at a time, with several weeks to recharge.)

"Just ignore him, love," Hawke said, giving Anders' arm a squeeze. "He's just jealous because he's got a fancier Jaeger than me but still can't match my kill-count."

Anders ignored him, shaking off Hawke's arm as he stood up, facing Fenris. "If you've got a problem with Garrett, you've got a problem with me," he said.

Fenris scowled at him. "I'm perfectly capable of having a problem with you all by yourself, without Hawke to hide behind."

"Me, hiding behind Hawke?" Anders laughed scornfully. "That's rich coming from you. Is it even you talking right now or the alcohol you've poured into your bloodstream that's making you brave? Too much of a coward to face the world sober?"

"Blondie..." Varric muttered, reaching out to take hold of Anders' elbow. Anders shook him off, still glaring daggers at Fenris.

Fenris sputtered. "I don't have to take this shit from a crazy, washed-up failure like you," he sneered.

Anders flushed red to his ears, and his fists clenched. "Oh, I'm a washed up failure, am I? At least I was a  _real_  pilot, when I had the chance. Not a lab experiment like you! You know you never would have been any use to anyone without Danarius' research!"

Danarius? Hawke didn't know who that was, but just the mention of his name spread a poisonous silence through the lounge like kaiju blood in a pool. Fenris blanched white, then his face began to slowly darken with a rush of blood as fury filled his visage, his tattoo scars standing out in livid white. It took him a few sputtering moments to find his tongue, and when he did it was in a stream of vicious Tevene. "Venhedis! Vishante kaffas! You dare?" he nearly screamed, reverting to Common. "You? You're no pilot! You failed your mission, you lost your Jaeger, you got your copilot killed! It's  _your fault_  he's dead and it's  _your fault_  we're under-strength! Worthless, defective piece of trash. You ought to be out rotting in the camps with the rest of the garbage! Instead, you're living in the lap of luxury as Hawke's little pet and pretending that you're still good for something more than fucking!"

For a moment, Hawke was sure that Anders was going to throw a punch at Fenris, and he winced in horrified anticipation. Even laid up off his feet as Fenris was, there was still a better than even chance that he'd win any fight Anders started, which left Hawke torn: he figured he had a duty to support his boyfriend, but attacking a guy on crutches was  _really_  bad form. "Ooh, are the boys gonna fight?" Merrill piped up excitedly. "C'mon fight! Fight!"

"Hush, kitten," Isabela muttered.

Their voices shattered the spell that had been cast over the room. Anders inhaled one deep breath; he was shaking all over, Hawke noticed with worry, from head to foot. Fists tight, he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

"Andraste's fucking grace, Fenris," Isabela groaned, breaking the awkward silence that fell in his wake. "We've all got trauma, okay? That doesn't excuse being an absolute prick about it."

Fenris looked a little green around the ears, not a good contrast with his coloring; he huddled further down on his bar stool clutching his drink. "He started it," Fenris muttered.

"No, actually, you did kind of start it," Varric observed.

"I started it with Hawke - he knows better," Fenris protested. "If  _he_ hadn't decided to involve himself -"

"I don't fucking want to hear it," Hawke snapped. "You can sharpen your claws on me all night long if it makes you feel better about yourself, but leave Anders out of it!"

He stormed out. By the time Hawke got out into the corridor, Anders was gone from sight. Hawke sighed. It was going to be another long night of hide-and-Anders.

"Hawke, wait!" A familiar voice called out from the lounge doorway, and Hawke slowed and turned with a sigh. Aveline was a breath of home, the only survivor of Lothering apart from himself and Carver, and as little as he wanted to talk to anyone right now he couldn't turn his back on her.

Aveline caught up to him in the dimmed corridor, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Listen, Hawke," she began, "don't be too hard on Fenris. He -"

"I know. I get it, okay?" Hawke interrupted. "I know he's been through a lot, and he can't be entirely rational on some topics. But it's not fair to Anders to ask him to just eat shit and smile when Fenris calls him 'defective' and 'crazy'."

Aveline's hand tightened slightly on his shoulder, the tension in her hand mirrored in her frown. "...he's not entirely wrong, you know."

"What?" Hawke stared at her; ready to laugh, certain he must have misheard.

"About Anders," Aveline said reluctantly. "I mean, he doesn't need to be so cruel about it, but he's got a point. Anders isn't... stable."

"Sorry, what?" Hawke knocked her hand away from his arm. "How did we get from Fenris being a prick to you telling me my boyfriend is crazy?"

Aveline fell back a step and crossed her arms, staring at Hawke with her lips tight. Hawke stared back, meeting her gaze with a challenge, and Aveline sighed. "Look," she said. "How much do you know about what happened with Freedom's Call?"

Freedom's Call. It took a minute for him to place that call sign, and when he did he was ashamed to have forgotten it; that was Anders' old Jaeger, from when he'd been a pilot. "I know it was involved in the battle at Brander's Reach," he said finally. "I know the Jaeger was totalled, and his copilot died. That's all."

"There was more to it than that," Aveline said, leaning up against the corridor wall. "The battle of Brander's Reach was a united push on the Breach... to find a way to destroy it once and for all. They failed, and the Jaegers involved had to retreat or were destroyed - including that one, but during the battle, Freedom's Call passed into the Breach itself."

Hawke felt a cold shock race up his spine, and he stared in disbelief. "What? How?"

"We don't know how," Aveline said. "We don't know how they got back, either. We don't know much at all, because all the Jaeger's recording instruments shorted out the moment they went through the Breach. The only recordings we do have are the pilots' suits life support telemetry. Hawke, the pilots of Freedom's Call were without oxygen for seven minutes in the Breach. Human brain death normally occurs after two.

"By the time they got back..." she sighed heavily. "Karl was unconscious. Anders managed to pilot Freedom's Call back to shore by himself, but... the neural strain, combined with the oxygen loss... I'm sorry, but there's no way he could have come through that without major brain damage. He was delirious for a week, raving when he was conscious at all, with constant seizures - he had to be restrained, to keep him from attacking the orderlies. No one thought he would ever recover... and when he did, he was different."

The look of pity on her face was too much; Hawke wanted to crack some inappropriate joke to wash it away, but for once in his life he couldn't think of one. All he could think of was Anders, the man he loved, tossing and turning in a hospital bed with his brain scrambled. Hawke had been on the end of enough bad disconnects to know how crushingly painful it could be to be alone in a harness, and he'd only ever been there for a few seconds. "What do you mean,  _different?"_ he finally managed to say.

"I mean different as in complete personality shift, of the Phineas Gage-railroad-spike-through-brain variety," Aveline said sharply. "You didn't know him then, Hawke. You don't know how he used to be. He was so easygoing back then, so happy, so quick with a joke."

"He still is," Hawke pointed out quickly.

Aveline shook her head. "Not like he used to be. Now he's moody, irritable... loses his temper at the drop of a hat... constantly picking fights. The slip in the booth today -"

"Maker's Breath, Aveline! Are you still on about that?" Hawke raked his hands through his hair.

"- is just the last in a long series of outbursts," Aveline siad, ignoring his interruption. "Anders has no impulse control whatsoever."

"Neither do I," Hawke snapped. "I'm kind of famous for it, actually, or did you miss the whole running naked through the Shatterdome thing earlier?"

Aveline's lips pressed into a tight line of annoyance. "That's not what I'm talking about -"

"And have you considered that maybe the reason he's 'moody' and 'irritable' is that people who are supposed to be his friends like to talk about him like he's damaged goods behind his back?" Hawke continued.

Aveline glared, then let her gaze soften. Her voice when she spoke again was soft, pitying. "I know this is hard for you to hear, Hawke, but he's not alright," she said. "That he survived is amazing - that he's functioning at all is a miracle - but he's not ever going to be normal again."

Hawke could deal with Aveline's prickliness, but it was the pity in her eyes that stopped him cold. He had to swallow hard to get past all the words crammed in his throat, all the wrong shape and size that he couldn't make himself say. "...What happened to his copilot?" he asked after a long silence. He'd known that Thekla was dead, but he'd always assumed the other pilot had died in the harness. If he'd made it back to shore alive, why wasn't he here now? "To Karl Thekla, the other one who went through the Breach and came back."

Aveline's gaze slid off towards the floor. "...They put him on life support, but that was all they could do for him," she said. "He was a complete flatline - no brain activity at all. When Anders was coherent enough to understand, he asked for the plug to be pulled. He said that Karl wouldn't want to live on like that, like a vegetable."

"Anders asked?" Hawke repeated, startled.

"He was Karl's designated next of kin," Aveline said with a shrug. "They couldn't prove he was mentally incompetent, so it was his decision."

Hawke's breath caught. He'd known Karl's name - Anders didn't like to talk about him, but he'd at least known that the two of them were lovers. But designated next of kin... That went far beyond just 'lovers.' He'd had no idea, none at all.

"He had to watch his lover die," Hawke realized. "And you don't think that's reason enough for a bit of moodiness after? I know this might come as a shock to you, Aveline, but some people do actually grieve."

Aveline's gaze snapped back to him with a glare and a snarl, and Hawke realized that he'd gone too far. He actually felt a stab of shame over it, a rare event in the life of Garrett Hawke. He took a step back, bowing his head and holding up one hand. "I'm sorry," he said, before she could rip into him. "That was uncalled for. I know you loved Wesley, and I know you grieved for him."

She took a deep breath, visibly reigning back in her temper. "Accepted," she said tightly.

An awkward silence hovered in the corridor between them, before Aveline let out a sigh. "Hawke, I'm not trying to destroy your relationship with Anders or anything like that," she said. "He makes you happy, you make him happy, good for both of you. But you really need to stop trying to force him into the chain of operations like you do. Ever since Karl's death, he's refused to even hook up to a pilot simulator. Whatever he was capable of once, he's not now."

"He does a perfectly fine job in the booth -" Hawke started.

"Reading off printouts from the R&D department!" Aveline threw up her hands in exasperation. "That's not exactly brain surgery. We could train a mabari to do that if they could talk."

"Did you actually just compare my boyfriend to a dog?" Hawke asked.

"For Andraste's sake, Hawke, I'm not trying to tell you this because I enjoy tearing him down," Aveline snapped.

"Could have fooled me," Hawke growled.

"I'm just trying to get you to see reason - for all our sakes," Aveline pushed on. "Anders doesn't belong in the Shatterdome any more."

"So, what then?" Hawke couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You agree with Fenris? You think we should kick him out of the Shatterdome, send him back to the camps? You know what Meredith does to 'marginals' who 'can't pull their weight.' That's a pretty fine reward you have in mind for service and sacrifice. I'll be sure to remember it if Varric and I are ever injured in combat."

High spots of color flared in Aveline's cheeks. "I don't care where he goes or what he does, but I don't want him on control if Donnic and I are out in battle!" she shouted. "I won't risk either of our lives or our Jaeger to coddle your broken boyfriend with an artificial sense of self-worth!"

She shoved past him in the hallway, her back rigid as she marched back towards the lounge. "He's not broken, Aveline!" Hawke yelled after her. "And if you'd just give him a chance, instead of forging blindly forward on your assumptions, you'd see that. But I suppose that's always been what you do best!"

* * *

 

~tbc...


	3. Investigation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke looks for Anders, then he finds him. He also manages to find some new questions.

Hawke stormed away down the steel and concrete corridors, fuming to himself. Fuck all Aveline knew. Anders didn't just 'read printouts' in the control booth. Sure, he got the data stream from R&D, but it took a former pilot to be able to sort out and prioritize what a current pilot needed to know. Anders had an eye for kaiju that no one else in the Shatterdome had, not even the other Jaeger teams. More than once his and Varric's hides had been saved by a quick warning from Anders - about things nobody else in the control booth had realized in time.

Fuck Aveline. Fuck Fenris. Anders  _was_  useful. Not just useful - irreplaceable. There was no one Hawke felt safer having his back in battle.

And Hawke needed to find him.

Anders wasn't in Hawke's quarters. Nor in his own, not that Hawke expected to find him there - a dreary, cramped closet in the lowest levels of the base, Anders hadn't spent much time there since the two of them became lovers. Hawke's rooms were much nicer. Nicer still with Anders in them. A scan of the canteen and the currently empty lounge rooms in the other blocks didn't turn up anything, so Hawke headed down to the R&D levels.

For some reason Anders spent a lot of time down here. Hawke wasn't entirely sure why; Anders had been a pediatric physician before he was a pilot, not a scientist or an engineer. Anatomy and pharmacology were not exactly compatible with hydraulic megaenginering and xenobiology, but maybe the more academic atmosphere of the research division appealed to him, compared to the rather military tone of the rest of the base.

The undisputed head of the R&D department was Dr. Morrigan - a whipcord thin, tense woman in a lab coat and glasses, with her dark hair always tied in a messy bun at the back of her head. She was undeniably beautiful, but not Hawke's type, Hawke not being the sort of man who preferred his lovers to tear off his head and eat it while they were mating.

Dr. Morrigan had degrees in things they didn't even give degrees for - rift formation theory, advanced hypothetical intraplanar physics - and talking to her never failed to make Hawke feel mentally about five years old. Probably a pretty good quality to have in your head of research, Hawke figured. She was insanely intelligent, ruthless and driven, and base scuttlebutt was firmly of the opinion that she would have held Cousland's position as Warden-Commander if not for the fact that she hated people.

More so today than usual, if her ferocious glower towards the screen in front of her was any indication; she was hunched over her keyboard, muttering and swearing balefully at whatever readouts she was getting. Hawke couldn't make heads or tails of it - graphs and charts with no coherence that he could tell, columns and columns of numbers that didn't actually have any numbers in them.

Hawke approached cautiously, and cleared his throat when Dr. Morrigan didn't look up. "Hi, Dr. Morrigan," he essayed with a charming smile. "Do you know where Anders is?"

She raised startlingly pale eyes to meet his, a flat glower on her elegant face, and the fingernails of one hand tapped against the top of her desk. "Tell me, pilot," she said. "Do you see that placard on my desk which reads 'guest services'?"

Hawke dared a glance down at her desk, overflowing with computer parts and papers, plus an intricately detailed skyball resting on a fancy mirror. "Uh, no?" he hazarded.

"That would be because I am not a fucking secretary!" Morrigan snarled. "I have better things to do than to keep track of people! There are two thousand megajoules of Fade particles that are going into this equation, and not coming out, and if I don't find out where the other end of the anchor is we'll be lucky if the kaiju eat us  _before_   the planet cracks apart!"

"Right," Hawke said, backing carefully away. He considered pointing out that she'd spent more time biting his head off than it would have taken her to simply say "no" and send him on his way; but he decided the results of such a quip wouldn't make either of them any happier.

Dr. Morrigan glared after him, then switched her glare back to the screen; she resumed swearing foully under her breath as she scrolled through pages of incomprehensible data. Hawke took the opportunity to slip away around a corner, further into the labs.

R&D was a department, but really more than anything it was a maze; an organic labyrinth of conjoined functions that had gradually grown to occupy every room and corridor in the Shatterdome not devoted to other functions. Unlike the hangar bays, or the dormitories, there was little order or efficiency to the chaotic mess of science and engineering that was the living support system of the Jaeger Wardens program. Hawke picked his way through long narrow corridors, past numerous tiny rooms stuffed with spare parts, through a high-ceilinged bay where Wade and Herren argued vociferously with each other about who exactly was intruding on whose side of the line painted down the exact middle of the lab. Hawke decided he didn't want to get into the middle of that, and continued on.

The next occupied room he found was a brightly-marked door emblazoned with the unsettling words SPECIMENS LAB; the door was ajar, and beyond it Hawke saw a small female figure in a hazmat suit and pigtails. She was busily attending to a large slab of unsettlingly-colored tissue with what looked like a chainsaw but smelled like a blowtorch, but on glancing up and spotting him she shut it off and shoved her goggles up her face. "Hawke!" she said, grinning and waving.

"Hey Dagna," Hawke said with an answering wave; he didn't particularly want to venture far enough into the room for a handclasp. "Have you seen -"

He didn't get to finish the question, though, because Dagna was already off and running. "Nice job out there today with Varterral!" she burbled. "I can't wait until the samples from the salvage team come in. I've heard about these spitter types before, but we've never had one to dissect! The best we ever got was second-hand chemical spectrum analyses from White Spire and you just  _know_ they don't bother to let their results cure properly, do they? They never do. I'm hoping we can duplicate the casing on the inside of their mouths and synthesize a protective film that we can use to coat the outside of the Jaegers and make them immune to their acid! Won't that be neat?"

"Sounds great," Hawke got out with difficulty. "Say, have you seen Anders around here anywhere?"

"Anders?" Dagna blinked, startled. It took visible effort for her to wrench her attention away from kaiju biology. "Oh, uh... I know he was here just a few minutes ago. He brought me coffee, and stole one of my donuts. I think he went back further into the stacks?"

"You're a queen, Dagna," Hawke said with a smile and a thumbs up. "Good luck with your... Varterral... bits."

"Thanks!" Dagna grinned, and pulled her facemask back down as she turned back towards the lump of meat.

Hawke continued on his way through the looping coils of R&D, feeling a little lost even with Dagna's directions. This part of the labs actually curved three-fourths of the way around the back of the hangar, the ceilings high and echoing even when the walls were narrow. He turned a second corner, and found himself in the fabrication bay.

At the far end of the room was a hatch large enough to admit a Jaeger, and along the wall to the left was the very Jaeger it was made for - though not quite the machine Hawke was used to. Although its metal frame was full-size, it lacked any of the bulky weaponry or ammo reserves of the fighting machines, nor the heavy armor plating; most of the casing it did have was opened and set aside to give access to the workings inside. Called Babydoll by most of the base staff, it was the full-scale testing model for every new component to make sure it worked with a Jaeger's system before being installed in the real deals. The chest hatch was open, revealing the half-disassembled cockpit within; it gave Hawke a queer feeling to look at it in this state, even knowing it was only a machine, as though he were looking at a friend laid out for open-heart surgery.

Aside from Babydoll, the bay housed racks and racks of computers, their exhaust keeping the otherwise chill metal and concrete room quite warm. Long tables and benches were interspersed with robotic arms, and terminal workstations lined the near wall. Most of them were empty, but one was occupied.

Not by Anders; Hawke recognized the stocky figure and blond hair of Sandal, one of the project's engineers. He had a three-dimensional rendering of the interior of a Jaeger splashed across three screens in front of him, and selected components of them were enlarged and exploded and cluttered with such notes and diagrams that Hawke couldn't even guess what part it was supposed to be.

Sandal glanced in his direction when he came in the door; then, after a moment, he looked back at the screen without saying anything. "Hello Sandal," Hawke said cheerfully. "Today's not a particularly wordy day, I guess?"

Sandal shook his head. His father Bodahn worked as a quartermaster in Supply Ops, but Sandal's engineering contributions to the project were invaluable. He was a brilliant and reliable employee, as long as he was given the space and the quiet that he needed; he'd helped make the special dragon modifications for Hawke's arm flamethrower.

He wouldn't have lasted a week under in Meredith Stannard's authority; her refugee camps were nicknamed 'the Gallows' for a reason.

"No worries, I'll get out of your hair in a moment," Hawke continued, shying his thoughts away. "Is Anders in here anywhere?"

Without taking his eyes off the screen Sandal lifted his hand and pointed off in the distance, towards where the stacks of servers marched off around the corner. Hawke bit back a sigh, and headed off in that direction. "Thanks, Sandal," he said.

The bay actually dead-ended a short while after turning the corner; there was nothing there but more computer racks and a few dusty workstations. Anders was there, standing facing into the back corner, completely still.

Hawke bit back his first impulse to yell; he walked cautiously forward, unsure what he was seeing. Anders had one hand resting on one of the computers, and seemed to be gazing intently at a patch of blank wall. Hawke couldn't see his face or his eyes at all from this angle. "Anders?" he called out tentatively, taking a step closer that shuffled over the floor. "Love?"

Anders startled slightly, then looked around him as if surprised. He dropped his hand as he turned around, and smiled upon seeing Hawke there. "Oh... Garrett!" he said. "I didn't hear you there. What time is it? Is the party over already?"

Hawke breathed a silent sigh of relief, easing forward and putting his arms around Anders' waist. The other man obligingly looped his arms around Hawke's neck, and they cuddled for a moment. "The party is wherever I am," Hawke proclaimed grandly.

"You didn't leave early, did you?" Anders frowned, his brow furrowing. "Not on account of me?"

Hawke snorted. "I left early on account of rampant toxicity in the air," he said. "It's no big deal. We'll kill another kaiju, and get another party."

Anders' expression softened. "I don't doubt you will."

Slinging his arm around Anders' waist, Hawke began to tug him out of the stacks. "C'mon, let's take the party back to my rooms," he wheedled as he encouraged Anders to move. "I think you made a few promises earlier that you have yet to keep. Something about eating your ass and then ramming a nice stiff pole into it?"

Anders flushed red again. "Garrett!" he exclaimed, casting a nervous glance around at the few technicians, watching their progress with amused interest.

Hawke laughed. "You can't possibly be embarrassed about that now, after the whole base got to hear it earlier."

"I can be embarrassed now  _because_  the whole base got to hear about it," Anders retorted. "Not all of us have your little exhibition kink, you know."

"Oh, you know you love it," Hawke leaned in and stole a quick kiss on the side of Anders' neck, just a stripe of tongue and quick application of suction. Anders let out a little noise of appreciation, his eyes fluttering closed, so Hawke was encouraged to try to steal another. "Would it help get you in the mood if I repeated the patented Hawke Seduction Technique for you?"

Anders' eyes flew open again, wide with horror. "Maker, no!" he exclaimed.

Hawke's courtship of Anders had been a time of great confusion, mortification, and hilarity for the entire base, since the Patented Hawke Seduction technique mostly consisted of Hawke turning up, naked, in places that Anders would come across him. Often semi-public places, at that. On each occasion he'd been wearing only boots, a smile, and carrying a new gift that he guessed would entice his target: a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of wine - once, memorably and horribly, a rather glitzy sex toy. The last (and ultimately most successful) in the series of presents had actually been a stuffed cat, which lived on the headboard above their pillow still; Anders had named it Mr. Wiggums.

"Believe me, I remain well and thoroughly seduced," Anders said firmly, taking Hawke's hand in his own as they crossed the threshhold of R&D's domain back into the rest of the base. "I'll be in your bed for as long as you want one badly-used, washed-up pilot there."

Hawke frowned, stopping in the hallway and turning to face Anders full on. "...You're not letting what Fenris said bother you, are you? Fenris is an ass. Everybody in the Shatterdome agrees." Well, except maybe Aveline; but he'd already decided he didn't care what Aveline thought. "But I'm sure even he realizes that he went too far and regrets it."

Anders scoffed. "I doubt that," he said. He sent an apologetic look up at Hawke's face. "Look, I know he's your friend and all - I shouldn't provoke him. He just..."

"...Not really?" Hawke frowned. He didn't  _dislike_  Fenris, but they weren't close. "I mean, he and I don't clash the way he and you do, but it's not like we go out for drinks together or anything? We just work together, that's all."

Anders looked away. "You're both Jaeger pilots," he said. "There's a bond in that that can't be ignored. And I'm... not."

Hawke tightened his hand around Anders' knuckles. "You were once."

"And I fumbled it all away," Anders said quietly, still looking intently at the ground.

Hawke reached up with his free hand and took Anders' chin, turning his face firmly up to meet his eyes again. With all the conviction he could pack into five words he said, "It wasn't your fault, love."

"You don't know that," Anders mumbled. "You weren't... you weren't there."

"I do know that, because I do know you," Hawke insisted. "And I know that even the best pilot, even the best team, sometimes runs up against something that's more than they can handle. The fact that Fenris doesn't realize that just means that he hasn't run up against that limit yet, and I hope to the Maker he never does, for his sake. I know that you did your damndest, and you got  _yourself_  out of there and got home, and I'm just so, so glad of that. It's not your  _fault."_

Anders' eyes were looking suspiciously red, but he still wouldn't make eye contact. Hawke sighed and stepped forward, wrapping Anders in his embrace. "If you can't trust yourself, then trust me when I tell you you're amazing," he said, and followed it up with a quick squeeze. "I mean. Just look at me! I'm awesome. I wouldn't waste my time on someone who wasn't equally awesome, would I?"

Anders let out a wry chuckle. "There are those who would say that your only flaw is an excess of charity," he said.

"That's ridiculous," Hawke scoffed. "I don't have any flaws."

That got a real laugh out of Anders, at least enough to banish the shroud of sadness hovering over him, and Hawke decided to take it. They walked in silence back the rest of the way to his room.

In absolute terms it wasn't fancy - a windowless grey room with metal walls, one open space with a tiny adjoined bathroom, squeezed in with prefab furniture and military-issue linens. But it was a larger space than most of the rest of the base personnel got, and he didn't have to share it with anyone, which was probably fortunate for the hypothetical roommate. There was a full bed, with fluffy sheets and  _multiple_  pillows, a writing desk that only Anders ever used, and a set of standing drawers to go with the closet. Most importantly of all right now, it was sturdy and soundproof and had a door that locked behind them as they fell inside the doorway together kissing.

More perks of being a pilot; Hawke's bathroom came with an actual bath. An ugly, stainless steel eyesore that barely fit a grown adult - Anders in particular had to twist up like a pretzel to make use of it - but suitable for soaking nevertheless. Hawke took the tub first - loudly proclaiming pilot's prerogative - but he hurried through his bath, making sure to leave most of the hot water for Anders.

They changed places, Anders into the tub and Hawke into the bedroom, with the exchange of heated glances and a promissory grope. Hawke hadn't bothered to get dressed after his bath (honestly, given the other places in the base he'd been naked, why would he balk at his own rooms?) and stretched out on his bed on top of the towel, enjoying the feel of the last of the warm water trickling off his skin.

Enticing splashing noises drifted from his bathroom, and Hawke half-closed his eyes as he reached down and took his cock in his hand, stroking it to encourage the latent half-hardness into something a little more useful. He'd made promises, after all.

Anders took longer in the bath than Hawke had, but then, he also had more hair to wash. He emerged in a towel, freshly shaved and his hair tousled from a towel, skin scrubbed pink and glowing. Hawke got up to meet him, and also stood up off the bed to hold out a hand to him, grinning as his eyes raked over Anders from head to toe. Anders blushed even pinker at the blatant scrutiny, but he did a little shimmy in place, the towel slipping down off his hips as he did. "Like what you see?" he purred.

"Well, you got a great view of me earlier," Hawke said with a smirk. "I thought I'd just return the favor."

"Yes, me and half the Shatterdome, just in case anyone was not already fully aware of just how lucky I am," Anders said, rolling his eyes.

Hawke shrugged. "If you got it, flaunt it," he said. He stepped forward and took Anders' hand, rubbing his thumb over the other man's palm. "But I think I'm just as lucky. You look absolutely edible."

Anders' breath caught, his chest hitching, and Hawke saw the edge of the towel tenting up against his own burgeoning erection. "Edible, you say," he breathed. He cleared his throat. "Just how 'edible' were you thinking?"

"Edible enough for me to eat your ass until you come screaming my name," Hawke promised him. "Then, once your ass is nice and wet and relaxed for me, I'll fuck it until you forget your own. That sound good to you?"

Anders moaned and surged forward, catching Hawke in his arms and pressing his lips against the other man's. Hawke leaned into the kiss, circling his arms around Anders' back to grip his ass and grind their bodies together.

Walking backwards, Hawke led Anders over to the bed, pitching backwards onto it and trusting to the excellent plushness of his mattress. Anders half-fell over him, catching himself on Hawke's shoulders and laughing. Wet strands of blond hair slid forward over his shoulders and down his forehead, and dripped water on Hawke's nose as Anders leaned down to kiss him.

He shifted, getting a grip on Anders' hips and pulling their groins together, rubbing up against the terrycloth of Anders' flagging towel and his much less flagging cock. Anders moaned against his mouth and surged up further onto the bed, dragging Hawke with him until they were both laid out flat.

For a few minutes they just rolled around on the bed and on each other, Hawke shamelessly enjoying the feeling of Anders' fresh, clean skin. He buried his face in the hollow of Anders' arm and rubbed shamelessly with his beard until Anders burst out laughing, and distracted him by running long fingers over his ass and squeezing tight.

At length Hawke inched his way back up Anders' chest until they were face to face, cocks perfectly aligned, rocking in a rhythm that was beginning to be less playful and more urgent. Hawke kissed Anders, dipped a tongue in his mouth and ran it along the inside of his lower lip, seizing the thin piece of flesh between his teeth and worrying it gently. Anders gasped. "Turn over, yeah?" Hawke whispered when he let go.

Anders turned over. He folded his arms on top of a flat pillow and buried his face in it, wet hair falling around the heated pink glow on his face. Hawke got up on his knees on the bed behind him and took hold of Anders' hips, guiding him to kneel up and scoot his knees forward and apart. Once he was in the right position, Hawke moved carefully to set his knees on the soles of Anders' turned-in feet, anchoring him there.

The view from here was absolutely perfect, and Hawke hovered for a moment, fingertips just brushing over the curving angles of Anders' ass, gazing down his back and to the sliver of profile that was all that showed of his face. He really did have such a nice ass, narrowing in from the hips to the buttocks, a bit on the bony side but not enough to dig in painfully. "You are incredible," Hawke murmured, and dropped a kiss at the end of the tailbone.

Anders made a noise in return that was muffled by distance and his own forearms, but whatever it was turned into a gasp of breath when Hawke repeated the kiss, then again lower. He ran his hands over Anders' cheeks, massaging with his palms, just enjoying the soft skin and firm muscle underneath; then he spread them gently apart and kissed him again, flicking his tongue out over the edge of Anders' hole.

A moan spilled up from the other end of the bed, and Hawke grinned as he leaned into it, nuzzling between the cheeks of Anders' ass and running his tongue around the rim of his entrance. He pushed his lips against the tight ring of muscle in an obscene kiss, hot and wet and encouraging it to spread wider.

Anders tilted his hips upwards, questing, seeking more, and Hawke ran one hand up the inside of his thigh to grope at his cock, massage his balls. He dipped his head down for a moment to suck at the skin at the bottom of the scrotum, eliciting a delicious whine, and then licking a slow stripe up the perenium back to his pucker. Cupping Anders' balls in the palm of his hand, he reached up his thumb to get a grip on the skin and pull down, just enough to open him up a little wider, giving Hawke access to lick and taste.

At the moment Anders' ass tasted like soap, on the outside and also - as Hawke discovered when he pushed his tongue further in - on the inside as well. Hawke kind of regretted the soap, although he was touched by the consideration. No wonder he had taken so long in the bath, Hawke thought, and the fond amusement made him chuckle.

"What are you laughing at," Anders muttered, face pressed tightly in the crook of his elbow.

"You don't know that I'm laughing," Hawke protested his innocence, or at least as innocent as he could be with two fingers and a tongue in another man's ass.

"It's kind of hard for me to miss when you are literally laughing into my butt." The word ended in a breathy gasp as Anders arched his back, stretching, yearning. "Garrett,  _please_."

"You are so pretty when you're flushed and desperate," Hawke commented, and plunged back to his work. His beard was beginning to get soaked from saliva running down his chin, into Anders and then spilling back out again; Anders' hole fluttered, wet and glistening and so sensitive that even the lightest of brushes could wring most cries and pants out of him. Anders' hips were moving in discordant little jerks, his hands still pinned under his head, his cock too far from anything to rub against for friction.

Hawke took pity and took Anders in hand, rubbing his right hand up and down the shaft and pausing to tease under the head with the tips of his fingers. His left hand was doing the same to his own cock, in his own lap, setting a matching pace between them.

_"Garrett!"_  Anders cried out, back pulling taut as a bowstring as he tossed his head back from the pillow. Hawke knew that sound, and he squeezed harder on the cock in his hand, thrusting as deep as he could into Anders' ass with his tongue. Anders shouted again, wordless and incoherent, before he was spurting thick fluid over Hawke's hand.

Hawke kept going through the orgasm, only slowing and lightening his strokes when the deliciously abused skin under his began to flinch and shy away. He gave one last affectionate kiss to the buttcheek and sat back, releasing Anders' cock so that he could wipe his mouth and beard on his forearm.

"Good?" he purred, and Anders groaned.

"Don't ask stupid questions," he muttered, and Hawke climbed backwards off Anders' feet so that he could tuck his knees under him and sit up. Anders face was flushed deep red, his eyes glazed and unfocused with the force of his orgasm, and wobbled unsteadily as he groped across the bed to seize Hawke and kiss him again.

Hawke returned the kiss enthusiastically, rubbing his own erection up against Anders' hip until Anders sat back a little, running his hands up Hawke's arms to push on his shoulders. "Lie back, love," he whispered. "I want to ride you."

A grin split Hawke's face. "That's the second-best idea I've heard tonight," he said.

Anders laughed, his eyes crinkling up as he did in the way Hawke loved. He went back against the pillows willingly, letting Anders sling a leg over his hip and climb up over him. He caressed his hands along Hawke's sides, fingers slotting along the grooves of muscle and ribs, and began to slowly sink down on Hawke's cock.

There was lube in the drawer of the nightstand but Anders didn't seem to be bothered enough to go for it, and Hawke figured he knew his own limits well enough not to require fussing. He was still slick enough from Hawke's own spit not to chafe, and Hawke let his eyes fall shut with a needy groan as Anders' breathing grew strained.

It was still too soon for Anders to get it up again, and his cock remained soft, but his eyes fluttered and breathy noises of appreciation escaped his lips as he ground down against Hawke's shaft. The shift and clench of hot muscle around him was incredible, better than his hand alone could ever manage, and Hawke couldn't keep from jerking up into that pressure.

This wasn't going to last, and they both knew it - Anders was high on afterglow, too blissed out to really concentrate, and Hawke had been working himself long before Anders climbed on top of him anyway. But at the same time, there was no hurry for it to end, no frenzied rush for the finish line; they had nowhere else they had to go or be, and they both knew they could spend as long as they wanted lost in each other, as many times as they would need.

It felt like Anders was all over him, embracing him, enveloping him; Hawke gasped for air against the constricting heat. His eyes rolled back in his head as his muscles tensed, and he shouted his completion.

Anders rode him through it, grinning down at him and twisting his hips with each rise in the way that he  _knew_  drove Hawke crazy. Hawke clutched at his sides, holding on for dear life as the world came back down to normal, white sparks clearing back into the dreary dimness of his room.

It was a nice room. Nicer with Anders there. "You look like you're having fun down there," Anders said with a smirk, and leaned down to kiss Hawke thoroughly. Hawke reached up and groped vaguely for his face, ending up trailing his knuckles over the line of Anders' jaw as he pulled back and eased himself off of Hawke.

"Hmm, well, this is where the party is," Hawke mumbled, too dazed to give the line the swagger it really needed. Anders still laughed softly, which was generous of him, Hawke thought.

With a couple minutes head start on recovery time, Anders had the presence of mind to reach down and pull up his towel, still damp from the bath, to clean them both off and make at least a token effort of wiping up the damp spot. He gave up and dropped the towel back over the edge of the bed as Hawke wrapped his arms around Anders' ribs and rolled them both over.

Anders' hair had dried enough that it wasn't dripping water anywhere, but the damp was still trapped in it - the fine, heavy fall of hair held the wet much longer than Hawke's short, coarse hair did. It felt cool and smooth against Hawke's skin as he curled his fingers in it, incredibly soft and clean, and Hawke hummed with happiness as he placed a kiss against the top of Anders' head.

"Y'know, you can come bother me anytime I'm not busy with pilot stuff," he said. "Or hang out in my room if you want, if I am. You don't have to go sneak off into the server room for a private place to have a quick wank."

It was an opening, a not-so-subtle push for Anders to say what he  _had_  been doing back there, since he definitely hadn't been doing that. But Anders only laughed, without making any other response, and snuggled down against Hawke's chest. Hawke stared down at him, feeling the echoing beat of Anders' heart against his skin, off-set to his own.

Sometimes, Hawke couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to be Anders' copilot instead of Varric's - to Drift with a lover as well as a friend. Would it be too distracting? Isabela and Merrill seemed to manage without it interfering with their fighting; Aveline and Donnic too, he assumed, although he valued his hide too much to ask for details.

Could it be any more intimate than this? Varric was his best friend, his other half, the two of their hearts beating in sync. But Anders... he would give anything to be able to get into Anders' head, to figure out what he was hiding from the rest of the world, to let him feel what Hawke felt so there would be no more doubts.

It was impossible, he knew - Anders had refused to even get aptitude scans done since Karl's death, let alone connect to a neural interface. Hawke couldn't blame him for that. How could Anders stand it? Loving Hawke, when he went out in Kirkwall Champion again and again knowing that each time might be the last? Knowing what dangers the pilots faced in battle, the ugly deaths that could await them in every one? He'd lived through that pain once; Hawke couldn't imagine surviving it twice.

But he couldn't have stopped. He loved to pilot, he had to pilot - for himself, for Bethy, for the world. The world needed him, and he needed to do this. Maybe that was why Anders never said anything - he didn't want to force Hawke to have to choose between him and the fight.

Maker willing, he'd never have to.

Hawke pulled Anders close against him, burying his face in the nape of his neck, and closed his eyes.

* * *

It was still night when Hawke awoke. There were no windows in his rooms, so he didn't know how near or far it might yet be to dawn; the only way to tell time in this sealed bunker was from the dim glow of the LEDs. But, wait. That light wasn't the right color to be coming from his clock, or his communicator, or any other of his electronic devices. Hawke roused slowly mind still fogged from sleep, trying to determine the source of the diffuse glow.

What he saw at the foot of his bed woke him up entirely.

Anders was gone from his side, his pillow dented and cool to the touch. In the narrow strip of empty floor between Hawke's bed and his desk, a darkened figure paced restlessly. Hawke recognized Anders' silhouette, the familiar features limned in that faint light he could not place, but he could not see his eyes nor make out his expression.

He heard the noise again, the faint muttering that had roused him from his sleep in the first place. Anders repeated the circuit from wall to wall, one hand clenched tightly in the other, head bowed and tilted to the side. His voice was low and guttural, and Hawke couldn't quite make out the words - was he even speaking in Common, or was that Ander? The syntax had a familiar rhythm to it, but the words themselves were too garbled to make out.

Anders turned and paced again, like a lion trapped in a too-small cage, his whole form tense and stiff with some barely-contained agitation. He came to the end of his circuit by the desk and all at once he whirled around and struck out, punching his fist against the wall with a dull  _thud._

Hawke jumped, but Anders didn't seem to have noticed. He stood motionless for a long time, fist still planted against the metal wall, and his shoulders heaved as he took in and let out a long breath. His head hung low, and he set his forearm against the wall and leaned against it.

The muttering and pacing ceased, and gradually the strange sourceless light died as well. Hawke waited for Anders to move again - to pace, to speak, to return to bed - but sometime during the waiting, he fell back into a restless sleep.

Come the morning light, Hawke was more than half convinced it had all been a strange dream - Anders was back in bed with him, snoring lightly and drooling on the pillow. The morning clarion hadn't gone off yet, and Hawke left Anders sleeping as he carefully extracted himself from the bed and made his way over to the wall by his desk.

The walls in his room were not flimsy, hollow sheet metal; they were heavy and solid, as everything in the base was, every cell of it built to resist explosions or kaiju depredations. Only once, by accidentally ramming two hundred pounds of solid wood edge-on against the wall with the weight of two people behind it, had Hawke managed to leave even a slight crease in the wall.

But another mark had joined the metal plating by the desk in the corner; shoulder-height, inch-deep, the size of a man's fist. Hawke stared at that dent, and knew that the previous night's strange experience had been no dream.

Legs trembling slightly, Hawke eased himself down into the desk chair and dragged his eyes back around to stare at his bed. Anders slept on, oblivious to the cold fear that snaked down his legs and up through his stomach, and Hawke was not even sure if this was fear  _of_  Anders, or fear  _for_  him.

_What happened to you in the Breach, love?_

* * *

~to be continued...


	4. Invasion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit gets real.

Life in the Shatterdome went on. Two weeks after the death of Varterral, they had another incursion: this one a rather unimpressive Category Two. Aveline and Donnic went out in Guard Captain, and pounded the kaiju thoroughly into the sand; with the Jaeger's extra-heavy armor and one-armed shield, it returned with barely a scratch. Anders did not ride the booth for that one.

With another victory and a relatively light duty schedule, morale in the base was high; a few people speculated optimistically that their yet-unseen invaders were losing heart and on the verge of giving up, while others joked that the kaiju were on summer vacation and would return to their usual schedule in the fall. The only people in the base who grew grimmer, instead of more festive, as the days ticked by without incident were Dr. Morrigan and - after spending a long afternoon closeted with her in his office - Warden-Commander Cousland.

The latter left Hawke with a vague sense of worry, despite the holiday atmosphere on the rest of the base. After a few half-hearted attempts at eavesdropping on the Commander failed, Hawke decided to try another angle.

"Anders, you spend a lot of time down in R&D," he said over the clamor and chatter of the mess hall one night. "What's Morrigan got a bug up her butt about? Can you tell?"

Anders didn't answer at first, mechanically spooning the admittedly unimpressive macaroni and cheese into his mouth while he stared down at the tray. He glanced around them - no one was sitting near enough to overhear their conversation, at least not at this level of noise - and then up at Hawke before he said, "Dr. Morrigan has been monitoring the energy levels of the Breach. She's concerned because it looks like there's been more activity at the far end than can be accounted for by the incursions we've seen on our end."

"Less activity is good, right?" Hawke said hopefully.

Anders smiled slightly. "You would think so," he said. His voice lowered yet further. "But the activity through the Breach has increased on a steady geometric pattern since it first appeared here on Thedas, and the frequency - and size - the kaiju ramped up accordingly. Ever since this invasion started the kaiju have just been getting bigger and nastier. Now suddenly they're fewer, smaller and less frequent? It doesn't add up."

Hawke's eyebrows flew upwards. "So... what?" he said. "You think this is some kind of trick? A feint, to make us lower our defenses and catch us off guard?"

"Dr. Morrigan thinks that the Commander thinks so," Anders said, neatly avoiding the actual question. "  _She's_  more worried about what they're using all that stored energy to  _do_. "

A sharp bark of laughter rose momentarily above the noise of the dining hall, before Hawke caught himself and quickly lowered his voice again. "They're already throwing Frankeinstein critters the size of skyscrapers at us," he hissed. "What more  _can_  they do?"

Anders only shrugged, keeping his eyes determinedly on his food. "Who knows?"

* * *

The break from fighting, while appreciated, did have the unfortunate side effect of leaving the pilots high and dry. There was no denying that they were all, to a greater or lesser extent, terrible adrenaline junkies (otherwise, they wouldn't have become pilots.) And there were only so many hours of calibration tutorials and simulation exercises you could do in a day before the hangar walls began to shrink in on you.

"I am soooo bored," Isabela moaned into the couch cushion. She was sprawled face-down over Merrill's lap on one of the vinyl couches in the H-M lounge, where she spent most of her off-hours. Merrill was playing with her ebony curls with one hand, and stroking the other gently over the curve of her middle back. Hawke had to admire Merrill's restraint in not taking advantage of the more bootylicious curves available in that posture, but then that was the difference between Merrill and himself.

Anders shared the opposite couch with him, Hawke's arm flung comfortably across the back of the couch behind him, and Varric sat in an armchair kitty-corner to them both. He and Hawke, and Isabela, each had a tin of terrible light beer; Merrill and Anders had opted for (in fairness, equally terrible) apple juice.

"Maker, can't you give us just a little kaiju invasion?" Isabela whined, rolling over to clasp her hands towards the sky. "Just a little one? Please, I've been so very good."

"Now, fortunately for all of us, I know that's bullshit," Varric said with a laugh.

"Don't joke about that," Anders said with a scowl, and Hawke gave his shoulder a little pat. "It's not funny."

"It's a little funny," Isabela pouted. She flung her hands up in the air. "Argh! I can't take it any more. I've got to get out of the Shatterdome! It's been weeks since I had a chance to smell the sea air - weeks!"

Merrill petted her hair again, murmuring soothing noises. Hawke sat up straight, suddenly taken by an idea. "Hey, why don't we throw a beach party?" he said brightly. "Pilots pound the sand!"

"Oooh!" Isabela sat up straight, or as straight as someone with her curves could. "Tell me more."

"You know, that's not a bad idea, Hawke," Merrill chirped. "I bet if we ask Carver, he can show us where to find some beaches that aren't even radioactive."

"I don't want to ask Carver," Hawke whined. "I don't want to  _bring_  Carver. I want to lie on the beach and get a full-body tan -"

"Aaand Hawke goes from zero to full-frontal nudity in twenty words," Varric said with a sigh. "Never fails."

Hawke ignored him. " -and make love to my boyfriend on the moonlit sand." He gave Anders a kiss towards his cheek that ended up more on his ear as Anders sputtered.

"Wait, wait," Anders objected. "We're not - have you actually ever tried to have sex on sand?"

"No?" Hawke shrugged. He'd only heard about it in stories - it sounded romantic.

"I have!" Isabela volunteered brightly. She gave a full-body shiver. "Extra- _grindy."_

"It is  _not_  fun," Anders said firmly. "Sand gets everywhere. Not an experience I want to repeat."

"Oh, will you be coming along, then, Anders?" Merrill said, blinking at the blond man. "I assumed you wouldn't, since Hawke said this was going to be a party for pilots."

Anders started to reply, but was cut off by Hawke suddenly tightening his grip, pulling Anders in close by his neck. "Anders counts," Hawke said; still smiling, but suddenly nobody wanted to object to his words.

"Well, frankly I don't see the appeal of this whole trip in the first place," Varric said, breaking the awkward silence like the champion he was. "We get enough of the ocean just wading through it fighting kaiju."

"Oh, but you don't get the full experience then," Isabela protested. "The feel of the stiff sea breeze in your hair - the salt on your tongue when you take a breath - that's the taste of  _freedom._  The rhythm of the waves, the cry of the gull -"

"The  _smell,"_  Varric interrupted this stream of lyricism. "The salt that gets everywhere and itches and is impossible to wash off because all the water is just as salty. And did I mention the smell? The ocean stinks, Rivaini. Fish piss in it."

"Well, you don't have to go in the water if you don't want to swim," Hawke said with a little shrug. It was a given that they were going to go, and Varric would come, despite all his kvetching. Varric always followed where Hawke led, without hesitation if not without complaint.

"Damn right I'm not going to go in the water," Varric grumbled. "Absolutely everything that lives in it would be happy to eat you, you do realize that? Did you know that the composition of seawater is almost chemically identical to a living cell? The entire ocean is a single living, monstrous entity. One that wants to  _eat you."_

Isabela sighed wistfully. "Mm, you just say the sweetest things," she said.

"Well, I think it's a good idea, anyway," Merrill said gamely. "Let's do it. Should we bring -"

Whatever she was planning to bring, they never found out; because at that moment a klaxon went off in the dormitory that deafened all other thought.

It had been years since anyone on base had heard this particular alarm, but every warden in the Shatterdome recognized it: the all-quarters, all-hands-on-deck alert. The  _big_  one.

Without exchanging a word - not that they could have made themselves heard over the klaxon - they rose and bolted for the door. Hawke didn't let go of Anders' arm, so he was carried along by the rush; the crowds in the hallway melted aside for the Jaeger pilots, even as the PA system began to crackle off their call signs. "Andraste's Fist pilots, report for hangar duty immediately. Nature's Fury pilots, report for hangar duty immediately. Guard Captain pilots, report for hangar duty immediately. Kirkwall Champion pilots, report..."

Warden-Commander Cousland was waiting for them in the hangar, in the staging bay by the wide cargo doors; Fenris was already there, pacing restlessly from one yellow line to another. With his foot healed, he was back to his usual nervous prowling energy; he barely spared a nod of greeting for the other pilots, and didn't even bother to scowl at Anders.

Sebastian arrived last, flushed from the sprint down to the Hangar. "Warden-Commander! What's the news?" he said breathlessly, and Cousland turned and held up a warning hand in his direction. A crowd had gathered of base personnel not immediately called to other stations in response to the klaxon, and he addressed them and the pilots both.

"What Dr. Morrigan predicted would happen long ago," he said quietly, though his voice still rolled throughout the hangar. "We have a double incursion, Wardens."

A murmur of dismay and anticipation rolled through the crowd, and Cousland raised his hand higher. "Fortunately, we have more than enough firepower to handle it," he said. "Still, the tactical importance of outnumbering your enemy cannot be neglected, so we will send all three full-strength Jaegers to fight them; Andraste's Fist, Nature's Fury, and Guard Captain. Kirkwall Champion," Cousland said, turning towards Hawke and Varric. "You will remain at the base, active and ready, to serve as a reserve or a last line of defense, should the enemy break through our lines."

Hawke nodded understanding. "Aye, Commander," he said, resisting a twinge of disappointment. It only made sense - the ranged weapons on Kirkwall Champion were not fully repaired yet, leaving their Jaeger understrength - but he wouldn't have been a pilot if he didn't crave the excitement of a kaiju battle.

_Two_  kaiju; a double event. Hawke felt nearly sick with adrenaline thinking of it. One kaiju at a time was more than enough nightmare for anyone, let alone multiples - working together? Were the kaiju capable of that level of cooperation?

At a word from the Commander, he moved back against the hangar doors while the three active pilot teams swarmed up into their Jaegers; the prep teams would get the active Jaegers ready first, then return to help Varric into the mech once they were on their way to the battle site.

That left him temporarily alone with Anders, pressed up against the metal bulkhead at his side. He watched the chaos of the crowd, the babble of voices and the racket of machinery; yet despite the urgency in the air everyone moved with purpose, no one panicked. Everyone had a place to be and a part to play.

"Will you head up to Ops once I hit the water?" Hawke asked, turning his head to look at Anders.

Anders frowned, shaking his head. "I don't think I can... Aveline's instructions were very clear." He chewed nervously on the edge of his thumb, his hand gripping the opposite elbow as if to keep himself together. "She doesn't want me there, and she's a pilot."

"But I do," Hawke whined. "And I'm a pilot too!"

"Yes, but she's active and you're reserve, so I'm pretty sure her wishes take precedence here." He managed a strained chuckle. "Plus she would definitely win in an arm-wrestling contest."

"Well, maybe you can be  _reserve ops_ , then," Hawke compromised. "You don't have to man a station or be on the channel, just... be there. Listening in. I'd feel better if I knew you were there." Better for having Anders at his back, even remotely; better for knowing that Anders was in the operations center, the single most heavily protected square meters of real estate in the Free Marches for the duration of a kaiju attack. Better all around, really.

"Well... I'll try." Anders pulled a face. Hawke couldn't keep from smiling, and leaned in for a kiss.

Anders clung to him with a surprising determination; tension thrummed through his body, bleeding from his fingers where they twisted in the folds of Hawke's shirt. He kissed Hawke like he would devour him, swallow him whole, and Hawke did his best to meet that hunger with his own eagerness, the steady burn of the adrenaline rush.

A familiar siren whooped from the platform overhead; Guard Captain had cleared the hangar bay doors, Nature's Fury was running its last checks, and the prep teams were ready for Kirkwall Champion. Anders broke off the kiss with a quiet moan before Hawke had to, hands running down Hawke's arms to cling for a last minute to his fingers. "Time to go," Hawke said regretfully."

"Garrett..." Anders began, holding his gaze. "Be careful out there today."

"Me? I'll be fine," Hawke said in surprise. "I'm reserve, remember? I'm not likely to see any fighting at all."

"Yes, but... you never know." Anders bit his lip. "Never turn your back on the Breach, all right?"

Hawke smiled. "I won't," he promised, and leaned in for one last kiss. The siren whooped again, this time accompanied by the impatient shouts of the prep crew, and Anders vanished into the crowd of people as Hawke let himself be pulled into the machinery of the Jaeger.

He shimmied into his flight suit and took the lift to the cockpit, in no particular hurry; they couldn't leave the hangar until all the active Jaegers had gone on ahead. Varric was already in the harness, an electronic reader in one hand as he waited for his partner to show up. As Hawke scrambled into the cockpit he looked up, grinned at Hawke and saluted with the book, then tucked it away as they began the start-up sequence.

The familiar whisper of the Drift surrounded him, Varric's mind coming seamlessly to bear alongside his own. They watched the other Jaegers parade one by one out of the hangar, setting off for their rendezvous with the most recent incursion; a steady stream of numbers and figures accompanied each one, and Hawke knew the thoughts were not his own. He'd honestly never really had that much interest in the minute statistics of the giant robots, aside from what was directly relevant to him as a pilot; but Varric did.

Andraste's Fist was the first out the gate, eighty-five meters tall and gleaming in white armor highlighted with silver accents. 2,400 tons of silverite and titanium alloy, with an Arbiter Tac-Conn operating system and an XIG Supercell Chamber energy core. It would have been a fine and formidable machine with just the standard 3-meter stingblade energy mount, but the Jaeger made use of a revolutionary new Tesla phase technology engine that allowed it to literally punch through most known forms of matter.

Following quick on its heels was Nature's Fury, looking small beside the silver and white Jaeger at only seventy-five meters and 1,850 tons. It had a quick and sleek design, its black-painted armor crossed with gold and green camouflage. Its iso-thor reaction chamber core was more than equal to the task of powering the smaller mech, with ballistic mortar cannons and a long, flexible Viper energy-cast whip making up its weapons complement. Nature's Fury was fast and agile, better at running circles around its enemies and taunting them with a distance than closing, but Isabela and Merrill knew intimately well how to work their strengths and get results.

Finally, stumping along behind came the steel-grey and burnt-orange Guard Captain; its height matched Andraste's Fist but was nearly five hundred tons heavier, with double-reinforced armor plating and MGS112 recharging energy core to make up for the extra weight. Along with its stun turbines and fist spikes, Guard Captain carried a flexible, mobile shield of layered carbon nanoweave that served equally well as attack or defense.

They moved deceptively fast, despite their size giving the illusion of slowness for how gradually they dwindled from view; Hawke watched them go first on his own Jaeger's viewport, then switching the screen to the helicopter drone pilots that tracked the pilots once they were out of sight. One Jaeger alone was impressive; three moving together was truly sobering. Hawke could only imagine what a whole corp of them had looked like at Brandel's Reach.

Despite his disappointment that he wasn't going to be fighting, Hawke and Varric felt a shared swell of pride - in their friends, their comrades, and for their entire world. They had been threatened, and this display of stunning technological accomplishment had been their response.

Hawke grinned.  _Yeah. We do pretty good work, us humans,_  he thought.

Varric was amused.  _What am I, chopped liver?_ he returned.

"Yes, humans and elves with the help of  _fine dwarven crafts_ ," Hawke said aloud, laughing. "That any better?"

Varric chuckled. No one else in their channel bothered to respond; such  _non sequitors_  were normal when pilots were in the Drift. Most everyone's attention was diverted by the progress of the three active pilots, making their way steadily to the rendezvous point. "Kirkwall Champion, exit the hangar and take up position one mile out, heading three-niner," came the sonorous voice of Sten over the comm channel.

"Aye, lieutenant," Varric said smartly, and the two of them moved as one as Kirkwall Champion detached from the dock and went stumping out of the hangar doors.

"Mission control, what's the status on these kaiju?" Aveline's voice crackled over the main channel. As Senior Pilot, she took the lead in most joint-Jaeger operations.

"Ugly, Captain," one of the booth operators - Hawke wasn't entirely sure who; aside from Anders and the two female operators, he couldn't tell them all apart by voice. "They seem to be sticking together for now, and are headed towards landfall near Starkhaven. First one, codename Bogeyman; second one, code name Plateface, both estimated category fours. We have no information on their abilities as of yet."

Not Anders' naming system at all, Hawke observed. Was the other man actually there in ops, lingering in the background as promised? Warden-Commander Cousland's voice came over the channel, deep and sonorous. "Keep the surveillance drones on them. Jaeger pilots, maintain interception heading. We'll take this cautiously."

"Commander..." another voice broke in, younger and more hesitant. Hawke actually  _could_  identify this one if only by the still-lingering adolescent squeak; Alain, one of the junior technicians. "There's a third bogey."

"A third?" Cousland's voice came like a whipcrack. "Just now?"

"No, sir, it seems to have come through the breach at the same time as the others - perhaps before," Alain reported. "Its energy signature was masked by them because it's smaller. Much smaller, sir. R&D has it tentatively as a Cat One, but we're not entirely sure - it's nearly off the bottom end of the scale. Even smaller than the first landfall incursion near Denerim."

"Is it also staying with the others? Will we be fighting three kaiju at once, not two?" Aveline demanded urgently.

"No ma'am, it seems to have broken off on another heading," Alain reported nervously. "It's - going north by northwest, heading three-forty."

That prompted a buzz of concern and agitation over the comm. Varric and Hawke's attention prickled up, wondering if they might get to fight something after all. "Is it headed for us?" Hawke asked, unable to quite keep the excitement out of his voice.

"You're not at full strength, Pilot, so don't sound so eager," Cousland told him dryly.

"Should one of us break off and double back to base?" Merrill's voice came over the comm.

"Let me see that heading," the Warden-Commander said, then there was a pause. "No. It's not on an interception vector at current, and there are no other settlements in the area. I want eyes in the sky on it at all times. If it comes to the base, Kirkwall Champion will deal with it; otherwise, the Category Fours are our priority."

"Yes, sir."

Hawke and Varric subsided, Hawke radiating disappointment, and the two of them fell back into sentry mode. The tension on the airwaves was palpable, almost a fizzing static that could be felt on the skin, as the three Jagers closed the distance to the two kaiju. "Coming up on interception point now," Aveline reported.

"Andraste's Fist, take out Plateface," Cousland directed. "Guard Captain, keep Boogeyman occupied. Nature's Fury, assist as appropriate. Let's get to work, boys and girls."

Not for the first time, Hawke cursed the lack of video feed from the cockpit as the battle was joined; they could pull up the transmissions from the sky drones if they wanted but it didn't show much. It didn't convey the thrumming surge of excitement that pulled wild battle yells from the other pilots' throats, didn't carry the jolting impact of metal on scale and plate. Hawke found himself leaning forward, bouncing on his toes until Varric, radiating amusement, eased them back.

As exciting as it was, the kaiju battle taking place in the ocean right now wasn't their priority. They had to guard the base, and there was still another kaiju out there - if a weak, undersized one. One channel down from the main battle chatter, several of the techs were muttering to themselves as they tried to figure out what the smaller kaiju was and what its purpose could be. Hawke listened with half an ear for this discussion, even as he tried to track the blows traded in the main battle.

"Are we sure it's actually a kaiju at all?" one voice asked. "It doesn't share many of their characteristics. These readings are strange."

"It came through the Breach; it's a kaiju," Morrigan's cool voice cut through the monologue.

"That just means it came from the other world, but not that it's a danger," the first voice argued. "The parasites come through the breach too, but they're not kaiju."

"This shrimp may be small for a kaiju, but it's still the size of a small building and moving with intention," Morrigan said crisply. "Get as much data on it as you can. It could be an invaluable specimen."

Cousland's voice cut in, as the Commander dropped briefly into the channel; once the battle was engaged, there was little he could do to advise or direct the combatants. "What's the current position on that third bogey?" he wanted to know. "Has it come any closer to the Base?"

"No, sir," Alain reported nervously. "It went to an empty cove about ten miles to the east of us and has just stayed there. It hasn't made any move to go ashore or come closer to us."

Hawke frowned as he heard that. He knew that cove fairly well; Carver's patrols often bivouacked there, because the high cliff walls on the landward side and reef on the seaward made it easily defensible and difficult to approach. Was it just a coincidence that the kaiju had picked that spot, or had it gone there  _because_  it was defensible? Was it just a coincidence that it was sitting right at the very edge of the range that would provoke them to make a move, waiting? The kaiju had never concerned themselves with such tactical considerations before.

"Commander?" Varric ventured. "Want me and Hawke to pop down there and clean it out? It shouldn't take long, not if it's only a category one."

There was a breathless moment of indecision, then Cousland's voice came back over the comm. "No," he said. "No, hold your position unless it makes an aggressive move. It could be a feint - an attempt to draw out our defenses so the base will be undefended against the larger two."

That the Commander was also thinking in terms of tactical movements on the part of their enemy was worrying. Hawke and Varric settled back down, wondering if they should point out the corollary; what if the two larger kaiju  _were_  the feint, meant to keep attention off this small one?

But that didn't make any sense. What could one sickly, undersized kaiju do that all its bigger, nastier counterparts hadn't?

Anders' voice floated through Hawke's earpiece, a welcome sound. "Can you get a visual on that small kaiju?" he said. He sounded muffled and distant, his voice relayed secondhand through someone else's headset; he must not be at a station of his own. "Thanks," Anders muttered, closer now, probably leaning over the shoulder of whatever obliging person must have pulled up the camera feed for him. "Could the drone circle around to get a look at the front...?"

A sudden surge of babble from the main combat channel momentarily stole Hawke's attention - "Guard Captain, your left!" Isabela's voice was shouting, all the playfulness gone from her voice. "Left! Left!"

"Watch those horns!" another voice cried out. " _Watch_  them - Donnic - !"

"How is it doing that?" Donnic yelled back, panic in his voice. "It shouldn't be possible -"

"I don't care  _how,_  just hold it  _still -"_

Alarms blared, pilots shouted, and the Commander's voice bellowed over the combat channel, giving orders; throughout all the hubbub, it was possible that only Hawke was able to pick up Anders' next words.

"Maker preserve us," the ex-pilot said, his voice an ashen whisper. "It's an emissary."

There was a brief scuffling noise, some surprised cries, and then Anders' voice rang out over the comm channel - over  _all_  the comm channels, including the battle channel. "Attention, all Jaeger pilots!" he cried. "Bogey Three is now your top kill priority! Repeat, Bogey Three is top priority! It must be killed  _immediately!"_

"Get off the channel, Anders!" Aveline snarled, nearly in chorus with Fenris yelling out "Who gave that spastic control of a mike?"

"Anders,stand down!" Cousland's voice overruled Anders'. "You do not have the authority to give orders to pilots! This is not the time for this!"

"Listen!" Anders called urgently. "It's a trick! The other two are only distractions, decoys! The emissary is the real target. It's not a mindless beast, like the others, it's intelligent, it can -"

"What is that fool talking about?" Morrigan snarled. "An intelligent kaiju?"

"I - I don't know..." Alain stammered uncertainly. "We don't have any files on kaiju of this type..."

More shouting, more scuffling, and then Anders' voice over the microphone cut out; Hawke could only hear him in the background, still shouting over Cousland's call for security.

Anders' warning was not going to be heeded. A quick glance at the tactical menu told him that; even if the other pilots had been inclined to listen, they were still heavily engaged in combat, and too far to cover the distance from the site of battle to the cove.

But  _Kirkwall Champion_  was not.

He urged the Jaeger to move, but Varric hung back doubtfully.  _You sure about this?_  he inquired silently, through the drift.

_I have faith in Anders,_  Hawke thought back.  _And he has faith in me._

Silent acquiescence; he could feel Varric's nervousness and uncertainty over this whole situation through the Drift, the desire to be doing something rather than waiting for the other shoe to drop. In sync once more, the Jaeger began to move.

"Kirkwall Champion, what are you doing?" Cousland snapped over the comm. "Return to your post! You haven't been ordered to move out."

"Sorry, sir," Hawke replied cheerfully; without any other Jaegers in the base, after all, there was not much that the Warden-Commander could actually do to enforce his orders. "We've got a kaiju that needs killing. And you  _know_  how I feel about killing kaiju."

A chorus of disbelief and snarling anger greeted that declaration, but Hawke ignored it, their Jaeger eating up the distance between the base and the cove. Varric was the one to cringe, but he followed along behind Hawke loyally.

Hawke just hoped he was doing the right thing.

_Oh, NOW you doubt,_  Varric groused. Hawke gave the mental equivalent of a helpless little shrug.

They were coming up on the cove now; it wasn't very far away, but navigating past the barriers of cliff and reef were going to be a challenge. Between the rocks they caught glimpses of the mystery kaiju.

Mission Control was right, it didn't  _look_  like much of a threat; small and spindly, barely the size of a semi truck, almost tiny when compared to the Jaeger. It was crouching in the shallows of the cove, attention focused on something in front of it - it took several minutes of struggling with rock obstacles before they shifted position enough to get a glimpse of its treasure.

Even then it was nothing that made sense to Hawke, or Varric either; what looked like a stubby, broken-off pillar of crystal, a red-glowing jumble of stone. It was obviously nothing of Thedas, meaning the kaiju must have brought it along with it through the Breach; the thought sent a thrill of terror trickling down both their spines. Kaiju that knew tactics? Kaiju that understood feints and fortifications? Kaiju using tools... using weapons?

"Mission control, we've got something strange here," Varric keyed open the mike, reporting back in dutifully. "Bogey Three has got some kind of... artifact here, maybe some kind of idol..."

"An artifact?" Morrigan's voice, sounding both suspicious and intrigued. "Recover that for our study, Champion."

Hawke rolled his eyes. "We'll have to take care of the kaiju first, before we can worry about its toys," he replied acerbically. "We'll be able to close in just a few minutes -"

"Do not wait to close," Anders' voice broke into the channel again - just their channel, not the main one. How he'd managed to get past Cousland's security to do that, Hawke's imagination could only wildly speculate. He sounded frantic. "Kill it from range, as soon as you get within range! It  _must not_  be allowed to activate that device!"

'Kill it from range' was all very sound advice - if not for the fact that Kirkwall Champion's ranged weapons were still out of order, which was why they had been put on guard duty in the first place. Hawke attempted to quicken their pace, forcing the Jaeger faster through the swelling waves.

The kaiju - Bogey Three -  _Emissary_  looked up as it heard their approached, and if not for its nightmare of a face Hawke would have thought that its form looked chillingly human. Too long and spindly, like a stick-insect, and with strange branching horns coming from its face and head - it raised that deformed, horned face in their direction and let out a chattering screech. Before Hawke and Varric had time to respond, it raised one clawlike appendage which flared with a sullen orange light, and then a glob of burning pitch was hurling in their direction.

Hawke yipped, and they threw Kirkwall Champion back and to the side - just barely dodging the smoking, boiling pyroclastic missile that sizzled past their shoulder. "Well,  _that's_  new," Varric said as they climbed to their feet.

It was new, but it was hellishly effective - every time they tried to get closer, Emissary would fling another ball of fire in their direction. All the time the twisted red crystal was growing brighter and brighter, as Emissary tended to it - if the camera feed was to be believed, feeding some kind of stream of energy into it? The sight of it hurt their eyes, hurt their mind to look too closely.

"Enough dodgeball," Hawke growled, and Varric agreed. They got back to their feet and charged the kaiju, plated arms crossed in front of them to block or deflect the fiery missiles. Emissary hissed and scuttled back, though not too far - seemingly unwilling to abandon its toy. Another fireball buffeted them, and then another, but Kirkwall Champion righted itself after each stumble and kept barreling on.

With only a dozen meters left to go, Hawke activated the wrist-mounted blades in Kirkwall Champion's armor, and shifted angles at the last moment; Emissary's outraged screeching was cut off along with its head, the horned monstrosity flying off into the water as the spindly body collapsed in a twitching, bleeding heap.

A cheer sounded over the channel. The only voice that didn't join in was Anders'. "The idol - the idol!" he cried. "Quickly, you have to destroy it!" Kirkwall Champion turned, triumphant, and began to step forward towards the red crystal -

\- and found themselves suddenly blown back, on the other side of the cove, ears and bodies stunned by the force of the detonation.

When the light started Hawke thought it had been some kind of bomb, and they had found themselves at ground zero - but instead of blasting outwards in a shockwave that would render them smears on the map, the light stayed put. Wind roared and waves battered at their Jaeger, but they were able to push back against it, staggering to their feet.

"Too late," Anders moaned through the headset.

" _Too late for what?"_  Cousland demanded.

Kirkwall Champion pushed forward against the punishing force of the wind, trying to reach that sinister light. A shimmering rainbow aura surrounded a core of bright gold, white-hot and pulsing like molten metal. A horrendous tearing noise accompanied the steady churning roar as the light expanded, the seawater around it boiling and churning with the force of escaping energies.

"A rift," Morrigan's voice came over the comm channel, detached and flat-calm in the face of the growing horror. "A second rift. This is where all their energy was going, for the past month. They were constructing a second Breach."

_A second breach._

The words struck Hawke and Varric like a death knell, filling them both with horror. A second Breach; a second hole in the world through which demons could claw their way inside. They were barely holding their own against the Kaiju invasion as it was, with three Shatterdomes hemming in the Breach from all sides. With a second point of entry, pouring kaiju into the world on two fronts at once, they would be caught in a pincer movement, they would be torn apart.

Kirkwall Champion surged forward, seized with the sudden need to stop it, to close it while it was still small, still soft, still forming - ignoring the warning shouts over the comm. Hawke didn't know what they  _could_  do - they couldn't just punch a rift in the fabric of space-time, now could they? - but they had to try.

Except they hadn't closed half the distance to the new portal before it began to flare, arcs of blue lightning forking off the coruscating border. Something moved within the fiery heart of the new Breach, something dark.

"Mission Control, we have another incursion incoming," Varric said, shouting over the relentless roaring of vibrations shaking their cockpit. "I repeat, we have incoming -"

And then the Something heaved its way out of the Breach, two arms gripping the conflagrant edges and pulling. Another set of limbs joined the first, squeezing the huge, dark bulk they were attached to through the slowly expanding space like a man pushing himself up out of a bath.

The first thing they saw was a head - broad and flat, dark eyes glittering with malice and long flaps of misshapen flesh streaking back over the skull. The mouth sported two sets of jaws, perpendicular to each other, trailing a long flapping tongue. The arms - well, the  _first_  set of arms - seemed to grow directly out of the sides of the face, seeking and grasping and jerking through the air. The other pair reached and groped blindly from the back of the head, twisted and misjointed.

And the thing pushed even more of itself out of the Breach, and a  _third_  set of arms revealed themselves - massive, bulky, muscular things mottled with patches of scale and patches of bare, vein-pulsed flesh. A massive torso heaved between them, lapped in layer upon layer of bulky armor; at the creases or joints peaked through even more disturbing glimpses of the bone beneath.

Hawke and Varric had fought a number of kaiju before, and seen footage of many more; they'd often joked about the monsters being clumsy mix-and-match projects of several different creatures. But it had never been so obvious - or so obscene. This kaiju looked like a  _dozen_  different skeletons fused together, or worse - they caught glimpses vestigial or half-formed structures like limbs or hips or ribcages half-melted into the main body. And the abomination that had heaved its way through the portal was already larger than any kaiju Hawke had ever seen - larger even than any he'd heard of in the archives - and it was  _still coming,_  dragging flopping limbs and a long, misshapen tail behind itself.

"Maker's  _breath_  that's an ugly one," someone breathed over the combat channel, the disgust so thick in the voice that Hawke wasn't even sure who it was.

"Kirkwall Champion, fall back!" Cousland said urgently. "This one is a category five. It's too strong for you to take alone. We'll bring the other Jaegers back immediately!"

"No can do, Commander," Varric replied. "It's too close to the base -- and it's too smart not to know it. There'll be nothing left to fall back  _to."_

"Pilot..." Cousland said, then trailed off into silence. "Do what you can, Kirkwall Champion."

The red Jaeger stood and looked up into the face of the monster, dripping and surging with seawater and saliva, as it shook itself free of the portal with a triumphant baying roar, and did the only thing they  _could_  do.

"Let's dance, you son of a bitch!" Varric yelled as they charged.

"At least it's never boring," Hawke said, the dry comment lost under the roar of wind and the bellowing scream of the kaiju.

One of the huge, misshapen arms came swinging around towards them like a club; they dodged it and sank in with their wristblade, aiming for one of the creases between the armor plates. The blade caught on gristle and bone, dragging with a horrible grinding noise and a spurt of bright blue radioactive blood, and the kaiju shrieked in fury. One of the smaller limbs darted down, quicker and more nimbler than the Champion could respond, and seized hold of the Jaeger's head.

Metal squealed and bent as crusted talons dug in; thankfully, the 'head' in a Jaeger's design was really only there for cosmetic purposes, to complete the humanoid silhouette and make the monstrous machine more relatable to human audiences back home. It contained some backup computing systems and oxygen reserves, but nothing too vital was lost as the metal chamber was crushed under the force of the blow.

But it was still a lever the monster could use to lift them up - the Jaeger's metal skeleton protesting at the unaccustomed force vectors - and this time there was no dodging the heavy limb that came sweeping across in the other direction. Metal tore, water and oxygen tanks bursting into the air as the Jaeger flew across the cove and impacted with rock walls on the other side.

"We could use a little backup here!" Varric yelled as he and Hawke struggled the Jaeger back upright. If there was any reply, it was lost as the kaiju came charging across the cove and they barely managed to dodge aside; the monsters' massive bulk would have flattened them against the rock like a penny on a railroad track. Hawke did manage another slash across the kaiju's flank as they dodged, which resulted in more fountaining blue blood but no noticeable slowing or limping.

"Talk to me!" Hawke yelled as they came back to a fighting stance in the middle of the shallows. The kaiju advanced on them again, and the disparity of mass between them was just too great; every blow from the monster's fists sent them skidding back, unable to brace themselves or find footing. "Weaknesses! What's this thing's weakness? Eyes? Sinews? Underbelly?"

"Th-there's... we have no data on this type of kaiju," Alain's voice came back, stammering and paralyzed with terror. "I don't know - I don't know -"

"Anders!" Hawke snapped, dodging to the side and backing away, both wristblades out and ready. "What's its Void-bedamned weakness!"

"Why would he know -" Cousland began to say, but was interrupted by someone on the far end.

He recognized the noise of Anders' indrawn breath first, before the other man spoke. "In terms of physical force - it really doesn't have any," he reported, his tone hopeless and wooden. "Energy - certain kinds of energy attacks - electricity, fire..."

"Right," Hawke growled, and stepped back again, dodging a slashing blow from the kaiju's claws. "Fire it is, then."

Varric understood his plan as soon as it came to him, and his intimate knowledge of the Jaeger's circuitry came into play; they knew just where to reach, to grab, to rip open the paneling on the underside of the Jaeger's arm to tear out the mechanism for the dragon's fire-breathing head. The kaiju shrieked at them again, all limbs spread wide as it lunged with fanged jaws and flapping tongue; Hawke flung the entire fuel tank into its hideous face, and Varric ignited it with one faltering shot from their arm cannon.

The whole thing went up in a conflagration, and the kaiju screamed like a soul in hell; its very skin ignited, flesh melting like blubber as it thrashed and screamed. The beady eyes were lost in the boiling clouds of smoke and flame, and Hawke saw the opening and went for it; Kirkwall Champion lunged in and buried both blades between the armor plates of the chest.

One wristblade skittered off a hidden obstacle and snapped; the other went in to the hilt and stuck there, caught in the pinch of armor plates as the monster shifted. Kirkwall Champion threw itself backwards, scrabbling tugging with increasing frenzy, but to no avail.

_Release lever! There's a release lever!_  Varric's frantic thoughts flooded his own, along with the location of the release - on his side of the cockpit; Hawke lunged for it, but it was too late.

Two pairs of twisted, misshapen arms darted down from above, seizing the Jaeger at the ruined remains of the head, at the shoulder, and grabbing the one free arm. The massive, rock-hewn arms came around and caught Kirkwall Champion's legs, lifting the whole Jaeger up out of the water and dangling like a child's toy.  _Six arms,_  Hawke thought crazily,  _that's just not fair. One limb for each of ours and it still has two free?_

Huge patches of the creature's skin and flesh were seared, melted or cracked open to bleed black and blue; the eyes were blinded, but it was still aware, and it screamed with fury and malice and hate that left both pilots stunned.

The deformed limbs twisted and twitched with uncertainty; then, some kind of decision made, with a slow inexorability the monster began to tear Kirkwall Champion limb from limb.

Hawke's comm channel flooded with static and feedback squeals, shouting and human babble on the far end. It was drowned out by the shudder and groan of eighteen hundred tons of metal twisting and deforming under the inhuman pressure. The left arm gave way first - it was already weakened from the last battle and from the damage they'd done to break out the fuel tank. The whole limb tore away from the Jaeger's main body with a shower of sparks and a rushing flood of severed fuel and coolant lines.

Varric and Hawke both felt it; while the neural interface did not, thank the Maker, directly translate damage signals from the metal body as pain, there was a sudden rushing absence of feedback from that limb that was almost nauseating. And it wasn't over. One huge lower hand gripped Kirkwall Champion's knee, bunched, and twisted; the leg came apart, struts and cables connecting the two pieces disjointedly for a moment before the kaiju flung the loose part savagely into the ocean.

Shrill alarms and smoke of broken electronics filled the cockpit, the lights gone red through the haze. Hawke coughed raggedly; the ventilation wasn't working properly, since they'd lost their extra oxygen supplies earlier. "We have to - " he tried to say, but got lost in coughs again. "We can't -"

The kaiju brought the shattered, ripped form of Kirkwall Champion up close to its scarred and melted face, and brayed in triumph; the sound ricocheted around the cockpit, the baffling destroyed when the Jaeger's seals failed, and left Hawke slumping forward, stunned.

With an expression that could almost be called contempt, the kaiju ripped off one last dangling arm and flung the broken remains of the jaeger away, to land with a splash in the shallows. Hawke jolted back to awareness at the impact, panic rising as they struggled to right themselves and could not. Both arms gone, one leg gone, the last broken and not responding - they couldn't move.

It was all a chaos of noise around him; the voices and static shouting over the comm channel, the grunting victory cry of the kaiju, the screaming alarms of the cockpit reporting damage, damage, damage. But through it all Hawke's ears caught one sound that was more deadly, more insidious than the rest -

The sound of flowing water.

"We've lost containment -" Hawke gasped, struggling to free himself from the harness. It was no good; the automatic release was sluggish and frozen from the damage the computer had taken, and the manual overrides were twisted and bent from impacts. "The cockpit's not sealed! We've got water coming in!"

This panic he felt, Hawke dimly realized, was not all his own; not the suffocating, all-encompassing terror that swallowed his mind and threatening to devour his sanity. It was Varric, Varric who had always feared the water, Varric who could not swim; and was now pinned, trapped in his own worst nightmare, his personal hell. There was no more coherence, no more words to his half of the drift, just an endless panicked thrashing to escape the water's drowning grasp.

The last thing Hawke was aware of, echoing down to him as though through a long distant tunnel, was the sound of Anders' voice; calling for him, pleading for him. Hawke tried to grasp it, tried to hold on to this thread to lead him back to sanity again.

Then the thread broke, and Hawke followed the rabbit.

* * *

 

~tbc...


	5. Revelation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anders comes out to play, and he brings a friend.

Mission Control was a nightmare.

"We could use some backup here!" Hawke yelled, and Maker, it was the truth. Every reading the computers were getting from Kirkwall Champion was flashing critical, and the camera feed from the sky drones left no comfortable ignorance about how thoroughly Kirkwall Champion was outmatched.

Cousland sent Anders a hard look, one that said he would be answering a lot of very serious questions later, and grabbed his headset to change channels. "Fenris, Sebastian, change of plans," he barked out. "Disengage and fall back. I repeat, disengage and fall back towards the base. Kirkwall Champion is engaged with a Category Five threat and needs your assistance immediately."

"How can that be?" Sebastian's voice came incredulously over the channel, although thank the Maker, he and Fenris were already starting to obey, to attempt to back away. They were too good of soldiers to do otherwise, however much doubt they might voice. "No other kaiju crossed the Breach, certainly nothing that large! We could not have missed it!"

"We all missed it," Cousland said grimly. "Jaeger pilots, we have a second Breach."

A stunned silence rang across the comm at that, but Cousland didn't give them time for shock to set in. "I want Andraste's Fist and Kirkwall Champion to work on the Category Five together. Nature's Fury and Guard Captain, finish off the other two if you can, hold them at bay if not. This is why we fight, Wardens."

The chorus of "yes, sirs" over the comm was subdued, with an underlying current of panic - in everyone, not only the pilots. Even with the rapid redeployment of their forces, the odds against them were much worse than they had been, and looking to get even worse before they got better.

The silver-and-white Jaeger wrenched itself clear of Plateface  _(Saarebas,_  the voice in the back of his head whispered to him, providing the creature's proper name) and fell back. Nature's Fury and Guard Captain stepped into the gap, guarding their comrade's retreat; with the two Jaegers a solid wall at their back, Andraste's Fist began to turn to leave.

Anders saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.  _Saarebas_  drew back, and let loose with a violent concussion blast that detonated in the space between the two Jaegers, knocking them down and sending them sprawling to the side. That left a clear line of sight for the other kaiju, Boogeyman  _(Arishok,_  the helpful voice provided) to lower its horned head and charge like a speeding freight train.

Andraste's Fist had gotten no more than a dozen steps before  _Arishok_  tackled it from behind, driving a horn spike into its backplate and clear out the front. Alarms screamed and redlined as Arishok straightened up and shook itself, the Jaeger still impaled upon its horns; but Anders wasn't watching. His eyes were drawn, no matter how he fought to look away, to the screens where the Category Five kaiju  _(Harvester,_  the voice murmured,) was tearing Kirkwall Champion apart.

He'd be seeing this in nightmares for years to come, Anders thought - the way the monstrosity peeled chunks of his lover's Jaeger off of him and tossing them negligently into the sea. Even knowing that the Jaeger was only a machine, that the violation he was seeing was not of a living body - he still felt faint, and suddenly wanted to vomit.

Anders doubled forward, fists clenched and mouth open in agony, but he couldn't tear his horrified eyes away from the screen - not until Harvester apparently tired of his toy, and threw the shattered remains of the Jaeger away like a broken doll.  _Not the cockpit, oh thank the Maker, not the cockpit,_  Anders found himself praying; but even if Harvester hadn't, hadn't crushed the Jaeger's chest in one massive fist with pulp running out the side, Hawke still might be dead. Might be dying. Might be cut up by shrapnel inside the cage of his own suit, cooked by an electrical fire from malfunctioning wires, or slowly drowning in the ocean. Suffocated, just like Karl.

All of Mission Control was under the same frozen spell as Anders, locked to their stations and headsets and keyboards. There was no open panic - they were too professional, too controlled for panic - but it was there all the same, buried under the tight rigor of discipline, the slow horrified realization that they had just watched their two strongest Jaegers be taken down within a handful of minutes, and all three of their enemies were still alive.

And there was a second Breach on their doorstep, widening by the minute.

Cousland broke the silence, raising a shaking hand to his headset to key the Base-wide channels. "This is Warden-Commander Cousland to all hands," he said, his voice dead-calm and steady despite the tremor in his limbs. "Evacuation protocol Omega-One is now in effect. Repeat, evacuation protocol Omega-One commences immediately. All critical personnel must evacuate the Shatterdome immediately."

Deep in Anders' chest a warmth began to unspool, a bright thread of fire that pushed back against the cold horror of the situation.  _It is time,_  the glowing warmth whispered to him, pushing up through his chest into his hands, his throat, his skull.  _We are needed. We are called. Secrecy will no longer avail us. We must fight!_

It was an argument he'd heard many times, but this was the first time that Anders was in whole-hearted agreement.  _Yes,_  he thought back, and stood up from his station.

No one noticed him as he pulled the headset from his head, set it down on the console and walked quietly out of the booth. Alarms shrieked through the Shatterdome, personnel hurrying every which way as they scrambled to carry out Cousland's evacuation order. There was a grim set on every face, wild fear carefully repressed and contained in every set of eyes; but the glowing heat in Anders' chest carried him calmly onwards, barely hearing the klaxons beating in his ears.

R&D was almost quiet by comparison; no construction or experiments could take place while the Shatterdome was in active battle mode, so the only things running were the data collection stations. It was an odd island of calm among the chaos, an eye in the hurricane, and at the center of the storm was Morrigan pacing around and around her desk, raging into her headset while Dagna watched from the other side of the room with round, alarmed eyes.

"What is the meaning of this?" Morrigan yelled into her communicator - at Cousland on the other end, Anders could only assume. "Evacuation,  _now?_  With another Rift forming right before our eyes? This could be our only chance at gathering the data we need to learn how to close these things!"

Floating calm or not, Anders had no desire to become the target of her ire; he sidled carefully around the wall behind her, avoiding her gaze, attention narrowed purposefully to the hallway leading to the construction bay. "I am not one of your lackeys, Elias! You can not command me!" Morrigan raged behind him. She was the only one Anders had ever known to use the Warden-Commander's given name. "I know my duty, and it is here - to Thedas, and not to obey you!"

As Anders let himself quietly into the prototype hangar, he heard Morrigan let out a shriek of outrage. "Blast and boil my 'condition'!" she snapped. "What  _of_ my condition? What is the value in one half-life when thousands more hang in the balance?"

That last was almost enough to trip Anders up; only the solid heat inside his chest steadied him.  _She is in need of protection,_ the voice reminded him. _They are all in need of protection. We must provide it for them._

_Yes,_ Anders thought, and crossed the hangar in swift sure steps to fetch up before Babydoll.

Unlike in the main hangar, there were no personnel lifts to carry him up to the cockpit door; he scaled the mech by hand, his joints and muscles filling with a warm sweet glow of strength and energy. The cockpit opened at his touch, and he dropped inside.

The interior of Babydoll was at once strange and familiar to him. It was totally unlike the piloting chamber of Freedom's Call; that Jaeger had been neat and polished, everything buffed to a fine finish and laid out in meticulous rows for the use of the pilots. Babydoll was a mess - no bulkhead covers obstructing the interior of the electronics from view, no paint or labels to cover up the haphazard mess of wiring and circuitboards. Experimental and temporary modules crowded the cockpit smaller than usual, and instead of the standard double-harness for the neural interface, there was only one.

But it was still a Jaeger, still what Anders had been sworn and trained for. And he'd been in and out of Babydoll for months, adding his own modifications in secret. He crawled his way over to the single hanging harness and began the start-up sequences.

As Babydoll began to power on, the communications channels flickered to life. The first voice Anders heard was Cousland's, apparently continuing the same argument he'd heard on Morrigan's side out in the hallway. " - no defenses sufficient to counter this threat," Cousland said, sounding wearied beyond belief. "In less than an hour, this base will be destroyed and everyone still within it will die. The Kirkwall Shatterdome is finished. Our last and most sacred duty is to preserve what of our strength and knowledge can be preserved, to pass on to others that they may continue our fight."

Anders pulled down the harness' headset, and keyed his mike to on. "With all due respect, sir, we're not finished yet," he said calmly.

"Anders?" Cousland replied, startled. "Where are - What are you doing?"

"My job, sir," Anders replied. "I'm a Jaeger pilot. I was trained to fight kaiju, and there are kaiju for me to fight." He reached overhead and slammed the levers home to undo the stationary locks holding the Jaeger's limbs in place while in dock - the 'parking brakes,' as the engineers called them.

Speaking of engineers, the next voice to come over the comm was a familiar anguished wail. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" screeched Wade, the senior engineer of the R&D division. "What? In Babydoll? What! Why? That's only a prototype Jaeger! It's not built to fight!"

"All Jaegers are built to fight," Anders replied, bending to strap himself into the boots.

"There's only one harness! And you don't have a copilot!" Wade pointed out, gibbering slightly.

"I don't need one," Anders said, and smiled a little at the glow of warmth that surged within him in response.

"There's no weapons installed!" Wade sputtered.

"I don't need those either," Anders said. At least - he was fairly sure he didn't. This would be an extremely short fight, if that turned out not to be the case.

"There's no ARMOR!" Wade said with a wail.

For the first time Anders took pause, halfway through the act of pulling on the gloves. Wade was right; Babydoll had none of the heavy armoring of the battle Jaegers. "Well..." he said, and sighed. "I'd better hope I get lucky, then."

"Anders, stand down," came the steely voice of Lieutenant Sten. "You are acting without authorization. Power down and exit the Jaeger."

Anders ignored him, continuing the power-up sequence; but a cold sweat broke out over his neck, and he prayed fervently that he wouldn't have to fight his way out past his friends before he even got to the battle site.

"No," Cousland's voice came unexpectedly over the radio. "Let him continue."

"Commander?" Sten sounded confused.

"We've got nothing else left," Cousland said. "He's right; he's a Jaeger pilot. If he thinks he can do it... then let him do it. If nothing else, at least it might buy us some more time."

Anders felt a disgruntled disagreement from the presence inside of him. _We shall do far more than that,_ the voice muttered, and Anders couldn't stifle a laugh.

No doubt everyone else in the base - everyone in the booth, everyone listening in on the channel - thought that he was mad. Most of them thought so already, and this would just confirm their suspicions; the broken half-pilot throwing himself into certain suicide, determined to make of himself a martyr.

"Let's show them, shall we?" Anders murmured, and threw the switch to activate the neural interface.

Entering the Drift was like coming home again - for both of them. The cramped walls of the cockpit evaporated around them, to be replaced with a boundless landscape of mist and memories. His own memories, mostly - rooms flickering between his childhood bedroom, a series of whitewashed classrooms, his office at the pediatrician's clinic where he'd once worked. Figures ran in and out of the rooms, laughing or shouting or screaming in turn, all of the memories his own.

But the sky was shot through with searing poison green and electric blue, and when Anders turned his head to see where the other pilot should have been - where Karl once would have been - his gaze instead met an exact mirror of his own silhouette, outlined in arcs of white lightning and filled with flickering blue fire.

Anders smiled and reached across the Drift to connect with him. They didn't share many memories - there was little in the ageless, alien mind that Anders could comprehend enough to vicariously experience - but those few that they did share rushed and rippled through him now.

_Alone._

So lost, so scared, where are we? What happened? Is this the Breach? Oh, Maker... oh, Maker...

_Helpless._

Can't see, can't feel, no way back, we're trapped here, trapped forever, we'll never get home -

_Alone._

Karl, wake up, please wake up, I don't want to be alone right now, don't leave me alone...

_Despair._

...no way out, we're going to die here, we're going to die so far from home, there's no one out there, no one who can help...

_...Other?_

"Who's there?"  _his own voice, choking and breathless. Distress. Concern. Protect. Must protect. Want to help._ "What are you?"

_Other. Protector. Friend. Justice._

Help me.

_Join. Together..._

The memories that came after that were less pleasant, and Anders flinched through them; the chaos, the incoherence, the hallucinations. Brief glimpses of the inside of a hospital room, tied to the bed; shouting, fear, rage, pain. Seizures, two souls struggling for balance and harmony within one body, one brain. Waking to lucidity at last to find only emptiness, pain and sorrow where there should have been love. Where there should have been  _Karl._

By the time it was over, their bond solidified and quietened, the damage was done. No one in the Shatterdome could look at them now without a new caution in their eyes, a wariness and contempt;  _pity,_  from the kinder ones, and  _fear,_  from the rest.

No one except Hawke. Hawke never looked at him with either fear or pity; instead he looked at Anders like he was something worth looking at, something beautiful and worthwhile.  _Hawke,_  who was brave and selfless and funny and kind and handsome and who  _needed them now._

Hawke wasn't the only reason they were doing this, but  _Maker,_  he was a good one.

**_"It is good to be in a proper body again,"_**  the other rumbled, approval filling his tone and lighting up the Drift around them. No more a whisper in the back of his head, the voice filled the earth and sky, heard and felt like the very air around him. He stretched, and the Jaeger stretched with him, flickers of energy uncoiling out into the limbs and body of the metal body to claim them as his own.

"Are you saying that my body isn't a proper body?" Anders demanded, relying on the Drift to relay his amusement to the other.

The other presence snorted in disdain.  ** _"Pfaugh. Fragile and soft,"_**  he said. ** _"It requires protection. As do you. You must remain in the heart, where I can keep you safe."_**

"Believe me, I had planned on it," Anders promised him. He opened his eyes, the Drift overlain with the images and structure of the material world once more. He could feel the Jaeger around him as a second skin, more vibrant and real than his own body -  _fragile and soft,_ indeed. There was none of the usual dissociation, the delay, that usually came with piloting a Jaeger; this frame, this shell, belonged to them. It was their will that drove it, completely in harmony together. He could not say which of them led and which of them followed; together they were one.

_"Let's go,"_  they breathed, together.

Their grand rescue was nearly derailed before it even began, when they approached the hangar bay doors and found them closed. For a moment Anders felt a disorienting panic when he could not remember how doors were supposed to open - his other half had no real concept of doors at all. Fortunately, the slight hitch was saved from becoming a showstopper when the doors began to roll back on their own. Anders looked around and saw Sandal standing over by the door controls, waving a cheerful good-bye.

Sight was disorienting. Anders could faintly see the inside of the cockpit, and even the screens showing the external camera feeds - but he could also see those feeds directly, as though the cameras set on the outside of the Jaeger were his own eyes. It was becoming increasingly hard to tell which part of him was  _himself,_  Anders, and which part of him was the Jaeger.

They should have practiced this - they should have trained, with the Jaeger, before trying to take it directly into a life-or-death fight. Anders had been  _pretty_ sure the other presence would be able to interface with the Jaeger - the modifications they had both quietly worked on the computer components should have allowed it - but it was different to experience it firsthand. Disorienting, dizzying... and even more frighteningly, as natural as breathing. It might have been easier if it had felt harder.

**_We have yet to engage in battle,_**  the voice of the Jaeger cautioned him.  ** _Then we will see how much harder it feels._**

"Mission Control, what's the status of Harvester?" Anders said aloud, transmitting back to the Base. Even with the Omega-One evacuation going on, he knew they would still be there - they would be the last to leave their stations, if they did at all before death came for them.

"Status on... uh, status on what?" Alain's voice came back over the radio, tickling directly into his mind. Anders controlled a surge of impatience that was not entirely his own.

"Bogey Four," he growled. "The kaiju that came through the new breach. It is Harvester. What is it  _doing?"_

"At the moment it seems to be preoccupied with the new rift," Morrigan's cool voice replaced Alain's. "None of the sensors we have in that area are attuned to that kind of energy, but if I had to guess... I think it's strengthening it."

She was probably right. They pushed Babydoll a little faster. They had to get to the cove before the new Breach was stabilized, before Harvester could begin to call in yet more monsters from the world beyond...  _and before it's too late for Hawke._

Anxiety for Hawke gripped him and twisted; they'd lost contact with the Jaeger's status monitors before he'd even left mission control, and he knew that in a life-or-death situation, even seconds could be too long a delay. But there was nothing else they could have done, no faster way to get out here.  _They must destroy the Harvester before it could complete work on the new Breach_... no, they had to get Kirkwall Champion to safety and search for survivors...  _they had to..._

The two conflicting urges left Anders twitching and nauseous, agitated and unsure which way to jump - and when they finally arrived at the cove, seeing the dark bulk of Harvester silhouetted against the searing colored fire of the Breach, the fear won out. They spotted the twisted wreckage of Kirkwall Champion in the shallow water below the seawall - still visible, but partially submerged, while the tearing unnatural wind drove the frothing surf higher and higher around it.

Anders made a break for it, driving the Jaeger towards that motionless wreckage - but before he'd closed half the distance, Harvester sensed their presence. It whipped around, surprisingly fast for its massive bulk, and screamed at him.

"Babydoll - Anders, behind you!" Mission Control snapped in his ear. If they survived this, Anders thought, they'd really have to find a better name for the Jaeger.

In one frozen, time-stretched instant, Anders considered just how  _stupid_  an idea this had really been, coming out here in a testing model Jaeger with no weapons or armor, to battle a Category Five kaiju which had already taken out their best fighter without breaking a sweat.

Then Harvester charged towards them, and there was no more time for second thoughts; liquid fire surged through his limbs, through his body and through the Jaeger, limning the metal outlines of the suit with white fire. Anders eased back, panic releasing its grip on him as they moved, together, to meet the charge.

White fire gathered and deepened, then burst out of the Jaeger's shoulder-mounted arclights in an impossibly brilliant flare of blue-white. Harvester shrieked in confusion and pain, its charge faltering as it stumbled and tried to turn away from the burst of illumination.

Kaiju attacks usually occurred at night. It was well known by the xenobiologists that they had excellent night and underwater vision, but less well known was why - the world they had come from was darker, lit only by a dying red orb that provided only the weakest of sunlight.  ** _Children of darkness,_**  the voice in the suit supplied, and while true light was not deadly to them, it pained and disoriented them.

Keeping the light burning high, they darted forward to strike. Sticking out of Harvester's chest, still pinched between two armor plates, was the wristblade from Kirkwall Champion, the release mechanism torn off and trailing from the hilt. They closed their gauntlets about it, and blue fire sizzled down their arm to envelop the blade in a sheath of sapphire.

Harvester screamed again as the burning steel flared in its flesh - and then they ripped the dagger free, scoring a long cauterized gash in the thing's torso as they did. They smiled, Anders' mouth moving as a buzz of pleasure shook the suit;  _now_  they had a weapon. Their combined fury washed over the blade, wrapping around it in a coruscating aura of righteous rage, and they slashed again, leaving a smoking trail across the side of its neck.

The pain infuriated Harvester, overcoming the shock of the light, and it began to press forward again. They fell back, keeping Harvester at bay with their burning sword - but its reach exceeded their own. The creature's uppermost hands were pressed over its face, trying to shield it from the burning light, but that still left two more pairs of arms free - and the memory of what those arms had done to Kirkwall Champion still burned vividly in their mind.

That memory spurred them on; they pressed forward with a flurry of cuts and strikes. Everywhere Harvester swung, they were no longer there, the metal machine moving with an impossible, unnatural grace as though it too were a living being. The kaiju made a grab for them, extending two pairs of smaller, spindlier arms in their direction to try to pin them down to use its superior strength, just as it had done to Hawke -

Fury blazed, the blade swung in a vicious uppercut, and Harvester bellowed and staggered as the sword cut through both arms and sent them flying, the severed stumps twitching and smoking as the limbs splashed down into the water.  _Don't like it so much when it's you, do you?_  Anders thought viciously, the thoughts only half his own.  ** _Now we will have justice, we will have vengeance, for the atrocities you have inflicted on him -_**

Harvester moved unexpectedly, and they lurched and stumbled as the kaiju's leg connected with theirs in a vicious, brutal blow, crusted talons digging in cruelly. The unarmored metal frame buckled like tinfoil, and at a hard jerk from Harvester, separated from the knee down and fell away. They leapt back, precarious and overbalanced -

\- and blue fire filled the space where the foot had been, forming the ghost-image of an armored greave tipped with a wicked spike. They stepped experimentally, and found it bore their weight as well as the real one had; with a satisfied grin on his face, they pressed the attack again.

"Maker's breath," a voice muttered over his comm, and Anders recognized Alain. "What… what are we seeing? How is this even possible?"

"No distractions," Cousland snarled in return, and the channel went dead.  _Thank you, Commander,_  Anders thought, turning all his focus back on the Harvester.

Still, the call had been too close for Anders' liking, and it drove home just how fragile and unprepared they really were for this battle - for any battle. Harvester could just keep on clawing pieces of them away, and they couldn't keep up the substitutes forever - and it would only take one hit on the cockpit, unarmored and exposed as it was, to finish them.

**_Fear not. You will not be harmed; I will not allow it._ **

Even if they didn't, their offense was as weak as their defense. The light and fire they wielded could hurt Harvester, but not kill it - and their only weapon was too short to thrust home to any vital spot. Their only hope was to keep wearing it down, carving away pieces until the monster bled out. And that could take hours, hours that they did not have - hours that Nature's Fury and Guard Captain might not have - hours that Varric and Hawke unquestionably did not have.

The longer this battle lasted, the worse their chances became - the more they would weaken, the more likely some further enemies would come through the Breach in reinforcement. They had to end this, they had to close the Breach forever -

Anders wasn't sure which of them had had the thought; it bounced between them, unspoken and incandescent, wild with hope and with doubt.  ** _Yes,_  **the voice of the Jaeger spoke, unshaken by doubts.

This wasn't a task for a human; Anders let go and drifted, floating, a mere shell of a body encased in the carapace of the Jaeger, while all around him the presence of the other pushed forward, redoubling in intensity. The lights blazed forth again, twice as bright as before, and faint blue haloes began to rise from the skin of the Jaeger: forming the image of a man, a warrior, clad in plate armor and wielding a burning sword. Fiery horns streamed up from the conflagration where its face would be, and coruscating wings of arcing lightning rose from its back.

Blue-burning hands seized the Kaiju's shoulders, digging in to draw blood which was ignited by the fire in their palms. Harvester let out a shriek, lashing at the blue figure that gripped it with clawed appendages; chunks of metal broke off and splashed down into the sea, but the Jaeger was unrelenting.

One step, then another, and then a third, and the Kaiju was being forced backwards into the Breach. When it felt the lick of portal energies across its back, the monster rallied, redoubling its struggles and screams. In those wordless howls they could still hear the poisoned outpourings of the creature's mind; all the hate, vile threats and imprecations at the worms that dared to stand in their path, that dared defy the will of the Masters.

Anders shuddered, buffeted by the storm of hate and fury coming from all sides. He could barely hang on - he was no more than the doorway, the link between spirit and machine. The conduit through which the other poured all his frustration, his bitterness and hate for these vile beasts and their vile masters, the putrescent infection that sought to swarm over the realm of all that was good and light and remake it in their foul image.

Images flashed before his eyes, disorienting and strange: vistas the like of which he'd never seen, alien cityscapes with high proud towers now crumbling and cast down. Streets and tubeways that should be full of vibrant life, blowing with ashes and crushed crystal. A sky grown dark, choked with smoke and poison, oceans clogged and polluted with the slithering bodies of the children of darkness.

Justice pushed the child back further, into the very mouth of the Breach itself, and held it there; ghostly hands reached for the flickering rainbow borders of the rift, and found purchase. For years he had been helpless, forced to watch, forced to stand by and do nothing, but no longer. Now he could fight, he could protect, he could stop the evil at its source. He roared:  ** _"YOU WILL NEVER TAKE ANOTHER WORLD AS YOU TOOK MINE!"_**

And he wrenched the Breach closed.

Harvester howled like a soul in Hell - for a moment, and then it was silenced. The portal residue crackled, reeking the scent of sulfur and ozone... and then was gone, no more than a shimmer in the air to mark the place it had been. Half of Harvester stood still for a moment, held upright by the habits of the body it had once been; then gravity took over and the tower of oozing flesh toppled, the stinking mass of it sending up a splash as radioactive blood began to seep and bubble rapidly into the water.

The blue fire went out abruptly, quenched like a candleflame; and Anders stumbled as the ghostly prosthetic that had supported them vanished. He managed to catch himself on the metal stump, and  _not_  fall into the whirlpool of incredibly toxic death, thank you very much.

It felt strange, almost overpowering, to be in control of his own body - and his own Jaeger - once more. He was not entirely alone, thankfully - it would have been hell to try to control a Jaeger, even one this small, by himself - but the other presence was faint and muted, its fire exhausted.

"Hawke!" Thoughts of his lover rushed forward to fill the gap, filling him with panic. Struggling with the controls, he managed to wrest the damaged machine around, limping for the place in the water they had last seen the other Jaeger.

Kirkwall Champion was suspended on some sharp, underwater rocks near the edge of the cliff, their bristling spikes piercing the Jaeger's armor at several points. It was lucky they had, since otherwise the Jaeger would have filled with water and gone under; as it was, the crashing surf bathed the wounded Jaeger with each wave, filling it with a little more seawater each time.

Anders managed to heave Kirkwall Champion off the rocks and drag it the dozen yards to the stony beach, out of the reach of the increasingly-poisoned water. Kirkwall Champion was taller than Babydoll, and much more massive; if not for the three limbs it had already lost, he never would have been able to do it.

But he did it, in the end, rolling the larger Jaeger onto its back on the beach. He tapped his comm, but received only static - whatever they had done just now, it seemed to have fried his radio. Not that it mattered; everyone at the Base was too far to come in time.  _Help me,_  he pleaded the presence inside of him; a flash of blue, a phantom gauntlet, and Babydoll wrenched the chestplate of Kirkwall Champion clean off, exposing the cockpit underneath.

His hands shook as he undid the straps and clasps of the harness, only now beginning to feel the aches and bruises from where he'd been thrown around during the battle. Detaching from the neural harness felt like a blow, like he had just cut off his own legs for the sudden loss of sensation and power. But he had to do it; he had to get down there.

Grabbing an emergency cutting tool from its place in the corner, Anders clambered out of Babydoll and dropped a half-dozen yards, landing on the edge of the sheared metal and scrambling down into the cockpit. His boots landed in water, and he sank up to his knees; the cockpit was at a crazy slant, a good third of it buried under water. He sloshed through the trickling pool, searching.

He found Varric first; the dwarf was unresponsive, head lolling limply on his neck and body slumped in the harness; Anders hurriedly checked him over and found him breathing, heart still beating. He quickly cut the straps on the harness and hauled his friend out of the pool of water onto a clear stretch of floor (or rather, wall) where he arranged him in the recovery position.

_Where's Hawke?_

Varric had been held in place by his harness during the impact; Hawke had been half-torn out of his, and was lying half submerged in the pool, his face in the water. Dread filled Anders and thrust him forward, ripping at the remaining harness straps, tearing fabric and nails in his impatient frenzy. Finally,  _finally_  he got Hawke loose and manhandled him over to a clear spot on the wall, laying him out with exquisite tenderness.

Hawke's skin was waxy, his eyes closed and his head rolled bonelessly on his neck. Anders pressed his fingers to his neck and nearly sobbed with relief when he felt a pulse;  _alive. Still alive._  He switched his hand to Hawke's chest, stooping down next to his mouth, seeking a breath.

No breath.

Hawke was alive, his heart still beat, but he wasn't breathing.

Panic filled Anders and overflowed, choking him even as he threw himself into the motions of rescue breathing. His spine was intact, his airway clear... Anders pinched his nose and sealed his mouth over Hawke's, pushing air into his lungs. How long? How long had he been underwater, unconscious? Had he been drowning this whole time, all the time Anders wasted fighting the kaiju? No, that couldn't be, or he would already been dead. Had Anders done this, when he shifted Kirkwall Champion's position? How many seconds had that been?

_Two minutes..._

Two minutes without oxygen was enough to kill a human brain. Anders sobbed between breaths, his fingers under Hawke's chin keeping his face tilted up as his chest deflated. Two minutes without oxygen had killed Karl. Anders had survived only because of the alien passenger in his brain; they had not thought to extend that aid to Karl. And by the time they had gotten back to their world, gotten Freedom's Call back to the base, it had been too late.

_Please don't let it be too late, oh Maker, no._

Tears rolled down his face and dripped onto Hawke's; Anders ignored it as he continued the rescue breathing, his training taking over his body and leading him through the automatic, mechanical motions.  _Please... please..._

Hawke's body abruptly jerked, muscles clenching. Anders grabbed at him, hope making his heart beat wildly in his chest. Hawke choked, inhaled, and then threw up all over Anders' shirt.

Anders had never been happier to be spattered in someone else's vomit. He ignored the mess, kneeling over Hawke's head, rolling him up onto his side to make it easier for him to breathe. "Come on, wake up," he whispered, rubbing his thumb over Hawke's hand encouragingly. "Wake up, breathe, please be okay..."

Hawke was breathing now, wet crackling gasps that filled with liquid; he coughed and retched again, spitting a mess of bile and phlegm and seawater onto the metal grating. Anders cupped his free hand over Hawke's cheek, rubbing against the sodden mess of his beard. "Garrett, love... please," he said, unable to keep the desperation out of his voice. "Breathe, breathe, it'll be all right..."

But it might not. As much as his heart swelled to see Hawke breathing again, he couldn't stop the little seed of fear: Karl had breathed, too, dead and yet still alive on his pale hospital bed.

Hawke mumbled, his eyelashes fluttering. Heart in mouth, Anders crouched down nearly to the floor, his ear against Hawke's lips.

"Here. I'm... here," Hawke breathed, his voice ghosting against Anders' ear. "Wouldn't... leave you."

Anders burst into tears.

He gathered Hawke up in his arms, vacillating between wanting to clutch him close and wanting to make him comfortable. He pressed kisses in Hawke's hair, to his face, to his hands, and rocked him back and forth on the drenched and filthy metal grating. "It's okay, it's okay," he said over and over again, trying to fight back the sobs. "You're safe. We're okay. We're okay."

"Well, this is all heartstoppingly sweet and all," a rusty voice from the other side of the cockpit spoke; Anders lifted watering eyes to see Varric, awake and watching them. "But if it's all the same to you, I think when I tell this story later, I'll leave out the vomit."

* * *

~to be continued...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the Secret Companion is revealed! I'm pretty sure everybody saw that one coming. We'll find out what happened to the other Jaegers next chapter, but note the lack of a Major Character Death tag.
> 
> [ **This chapter now comes with art!** ](http://kinloch-ho.tumblr.com/post/127967766234/there-was-none-of-the-usual-dissociation-the)


	6. Explanation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anders has some serious explaining to do. Hawke is still struggling to catch up.

For Hawke, the story of the Battle of the Wounded Coast (as it came to be known) took some time to sink in. It wasn't the first time he'd woken up in the infirmary - laid up in bed with a worried Anders hovering nearby, flying high as a kite on morphine - so he was not at first inclined to panic. Most of the bones on his left side including his leg, his shoulder, and several ribs had broken where he'd hit the cockpit wall when the kaiju had flung Kirkwall Champion across the cove. Between the broken ribs and the water inhalation, the medical technicians were very worried about pneumonia settling into his lungs, and so he was surrounded by banks of monitors while Anders guarded his sleeping and waking dreams alike.

When he was first given the mission brief by a visiting Varric, he was still doped enough to the gills to accept the entire story unquestioningly. Of course, when he'd been in danger, Anders had come out in a Jaeger to save him. Of course, Anders had defeated a Category Five kaiju all by himself. Anders was still a pilot, wasn't he? He wasn't broken at all, now was he? Hadn't Hawke been telling everybody that? What was the big deal? Why was Varric even making that face?

It was only gradually, over the next few days, that the drug began to percolate out of his system and the reality of the situation began to percolate in. Only after a few days did he remember that there weren't any other Jaegers at the Kirkwall Shatterdome for Anders to have piloted, and no other pilots for him to have paired with. Only after a few days did he notice that Anders didn't leave the infirmary at all - not even for meals and sleep - and that there were security personnel stationed outside the door that made sure he did not. He learned, from snatches of conversation overheard from the bored guards, that Commander Cousland had thought Anders more likely to stay put if he was ordered confined to wherever Hawke was, rather than confined to quarters.

But the full reality of the situation didn't sink in until Hawke got hold of a handheld vid monitor long enough to catch some of the news footage circulating of the Battle of the Wounded Coast. He watched it the first morning he was strong enough to hold it up by himself, Anders curled up asleep on the next cot over. The sight of the tiny, stripped-down, weaponless Jaeger facing off against the monster that had so thoroughly decimated Kirkwall Champion was enough to thoroughly jolt him out of whatever morphine haze had lingered in his system.

The civilian newscasters didn't know enough about Jaegers to understand what they were seeing. They didn't understand just how outmatched little Babydoll had been -  _should_  have been. They didn't understand just how impossible were some of the things it had done. Their excited attention was all on the new form of kaiju, and its apparent Breach-opening powers, and wondering whether the Jaeger Wardens were up to handling this 'new escalation in the ongoing Kaiju assault.'

Up until a week ago, faced with a new category of Kaiju with unprecedented levels of tactical coordination and technological ability, Hawke would have said no. Now, he wasn't sure.

He stared at the fantastic impossibilities occurring on tape before him, and stared over the top of the vid monitor to the next cot, where Anders drifted in an uneasy sleep. His narrow face was pinched with worry and strain, a frown creasing his brow even when he slept, and his hands twitched as though still wrapped in a Jaeger's control gauntlets. Part of Hawke wanted to go to him, hold him and kiss that frown away, but something held him back.

Well, mostly it was the shattered femur and the three separate IVs that were holding him back. But even if they hadn't been, he had absolutely no idea what to do or say.

An all-too familiar voice on the newscast got his attention, and Hawke glanced back at the screen to see the grim face and severe bleach-bone hairdo of Meredith Stannard. "Of course, I and all my people fully stand by the Jaeger Wardens in this time of crisis," she was saying, and why anyone had thought her opinion mattered in this debate at all Hawke had no idea. "We stand ready to provide whatever support the Wardens require, and I personally guarantee that every single one of my workers will give their utmost effort to back the Wardens' construction requirements. No slacking or malingering will be tolerated while the fate of the world hangs in jeopardy -"

From the next cot over, Anders stirred and muttered. He turned his head and opened his eyes, and for a moment they were filled with a bright blue light, radiating out over a fierce scowl. Hawke knew the color of that light - had awoken in the dead of night to see Anders pacing, limned in such a light, muttering to himself in an unknown voice.

Then Anders blinked and pushed himself up, and the light was gone. Normal light hazel eyes, more than a little bloodshot, blinked at Hawke over his familiar beaky nose. "Garrett?" he said tiredly. "Are you okay, love? In pain?"

"Nothing I can't handle," Hawke said, and it was true enough; he still hurt a lot, but he'd spent enough time wallowing in the blissful haze of the morphine's grasp. Time to be awake and alert, lest he risk addiction. "What... was that? Just now?"

Anders grimaced. "Stannard," he said, a growl thrumming in his voice for a moment before it faded. "That woman... Not a fun time listening to her boasting about the way she abuses and exploits the refugees under her, even without the threat of being booted out at any time back into her tender care hanging over my head."

Hawke swallowed, mouth dry with a fuzziness that no amount of water could dispel. His eyes darted to the shadows of the security detail outside the door, then back to Anders. "That... wasn't quite what I meant," he said carefully. "You were... glowing. A bit."

Anders stilled, his expression briefly empty and so lost that Hawke would have jumped out of the bed if his leg would let him. He swallowed again, wishing he were more clear-headed for this but knowing that in this case, the morphine wasn't to blame for him being far out to sea without a paddle. He was a pilot; before that, he'd been a brawler, fighting to pave his and Carver's way through a bloody free-for-all of a shattered world. Before that, he'd been a farm boy, raising sheep and cows on the ranch back in Lothering that his mother had owned. None of that had prepared him for this.

"Love..." he started, and an indefinable tension went out of Anders at just that word. "What happened to you? I need to know."

Anders pressed his hands against his face, curling his fingers against his eyesockets as though to blind himself to the world. Just before Hawke could get really alarmed, he released the pressure and sighed, dropping his hands. "You deserve to know," he agreed. "But... can it wait an hour? I have an appointment with the Warden-Commander about this, and I'd rather not have to tell it twice."

"Am I invited to this appointment?" Hawke asked dubiously.

Anders set his jaw. "You'd better be, since I am apparently not allowed to leave the infirmary pending further notice," he said in a bitter tone. "If Cousland wants to talk to me, he can do it right here."

The words only confirmed what Hawke had already expected, but they were hardly reassuring. "Are you... in trouble?" he asked quietly.

Anders let out a strained laugh. "Oh, yes," he said, "except that nobody knows exactly what kind of trouble it is. That's what this 'interview' will determine, I imagine."

_It's nothing. You'll be fine. I'll be with you._  The words sat heavy on Hawke's tongue, and he couldn't spit them out; not when the next hour might make them into lies. Instead he reached out his good arm, waving vaguely at the air, and Anders captured his hand between both of his and bent over it.

"Whatever happens," he said in a low voice, his eyes hidden from meeting Hawke's, "it was worth it. For this."

* * *

Within an hour, as promised, Cousland appeared at the infirmary door. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was accompanied by Morrigan, glasses and labcoat and man-eating scowl all firmly in place. The rest of the infirmary staff, security detail and all, were ushered out to the corridor and the sound-baffling door shut firmly behind them. Only Cousland, Sten, Morrigan, Anders and Hawke remained.

Morrigan moved first, sitting down firmly on a chair across from Anders and pulling out a small recording device. Cousland took up station behind her, and Sten hovered faithfully in the background. "So," she said. "They will never take another world as they took yours... hm?"

Anders winced. "You heard that?" he mumbled. He wasn't looking at Hawke, but he was holding onto his hand, like a single point of contact in a storm-tossed sea.

"As far as we can determine, pilot," Cousland answered for him, "that particular broadcast went out on literally every communications wavelength on the planet. People in  _Nevarra_  heard that, though I'm sure they're just as mystified as we are by what it meant."

Anders squeezed his eyes shut, looking like he was having a brief but fierce internal argument. Before it could come to a conclusion, Morrigan started in.

"It would seem, Warden Anders," Morrigan said, clicking the recording device on, "that you came back from your sojourn the Breach with more than you went into it with."

"The NCI scan results processed that fast?" Anders mumbled.

"It's been our top priority." Morrigan turned her cool gaze on Anders. "You have a passenger you did not see fit to inform us of, Warden Anders. A denizen of the Breach, or of the world beyond?"

"He's not one of them," Anders said quickly. "I know what you're thinking - Maker knows it's what I'd be thinking if someone told me they'd brought an alien being from the other side of the Breach. But he's not one of them."

"What is 'he,' then?" Cousland asked skeptically, his arms crossed over his chest.

"The world beyond the breach..." Anders sighed. "I have to explain that a lot of this is very difficult to translate. He doesn't speak our language - he doesn't even think in words the same way we do. I don't get words from him, just... content. Intentions and feelings and meaning. So I don't know what they called themselves, the race who lived there, and I don't know what they called their planet. The words just show up in my head as "the world" and "the people." They're all dead now.

"But the makers of the kaiju are something else. He calls them the Adversaries. They work under a being known as the Architect, he's the one who builds the Kaiju. And they're sent, and controlled, by another being called the Conductor. But the world beyond the Breach wasn't their home world to begin with. The Adversaries invaded that world with an army of kaiju..." Anders swallowed hard, looking a little green in the skin. "Killed all the inhabitants, and took the world for their own. They adopted the technology of the people, learned it, and used it to start opening doors to other conquests."

"So the Breach... the technology to make rifts... that belonged to this other race? Not to the Adversaries?" Morrigan looked fascinated, but also skeptical.

Anders nodded. "That's how he knew how to close the new Breach," he said. "It was stolen from his people."

"Could he do the same for the main Breach?" Morrigan nearly pounced on the question. "The same way he did the new one?"

Anders shook his head, closing his eyes. "It's... complicated," he sighed. "I... this will take some time. The short answer is no, he can't. It's too... something. But he thinks he can help you develop a way to do it yourself."

Morrigan sat back, expression viciously satisfied, making furious notes on her tablet. Cousland stepped in to take control of the conversation.

"So if his world was invaded and all his people killed," Cousland wanted to know, "how did this... being survive?"

"Because he wasn't one of the people," Anders said. "This is very hard to explain... He wasn't born, he was  _built_. Sort of like... a computer. Except instead of being made of silicon and circuit chips, he was built out of energy. He doesn't just need energy to run - he  _is_ energy, but he's also alive. He's aware. He's a person."

This was enough to lure Morrigan back into the conversation. "An artificial intelligence? An actual AI?" she asked.

"Yes," Anders said. "Built for a single purpose. I'd say he was a cop, but it doesn't quite fit with how we know the word. He was made to fight injustice, to protect the weak. His duty was to..." He groped for words. "To find out where people were going to be hurt, and stop it from happening."

"Like a guardian angel," Hawke mumbled. He squeezed Anders' hand.

Anders squeezed back, a smile briefly lighting his eyes. "But with more statistics. Yes," he said.

The smile quickly died. "He fought the Adversaries, when they came to his world and starting killing his people. But he failed. They destroyed all of his..." He shook his head, frustrated. "Shells? Carapaces? His physical bodies, and although they couldn't kill him, he was helpless without them. He just sort of... drifted, watching as the Adversaries took over his world and murdered his people, watching as the Architect stole his people's knowledge, and used it to build terrible monsters.

"He knew they were going to do it again, and again, and again, but he couldn't stop them. It was..." He drew in a shuddering breath, grief and distress pinching his expression. "For someone like him, you have to understand, whose purpose is his very being - to be unable to act to fulfill that purpose... to be forced to stand by and watch evil happening, and be unable to stop it... it was hell."

The words hung in the sickbay for a moment, in the silence, and no one dared interrupt.

"And then we came." Anders sighed. "Me and Karl, in a shell like the ones he used to know. We had no air. We were dying. He touched me... spoke to me. Begged me for my help in defeating the Adversaries, offered his own help in return." His eyes flickered up to meet Hawke's, then away. "All I had to do was let him in."

"And you said yes," Hawke said disbelievingly. "You let this... alien cyborg  _thing_  inside your head."

Anders avoided his gaze. "I was scared. It hurt. I wanted to go home. He wanted to help me. And I wanted to help him."

"So you said yes," Hawke persisted.

"Yes," Anders whispered.

_" Good, "_ Hawke said savagely, and very nearly crushed Anders' hand within his own. He wanted to be sure that Anders understood that anything - any choice he had made, any act he had undertaken - was worth it so long as he was alive.

What he had most feared, dreaded to think, was that this... psychic parasite had invaded his lover's mind, taken him over and corrupted him into something else - a thought that was all the more dreaded because it had happened before they had ever met. But as long as this was something Anders had chosen, something to which he had given his consent... then Hawke could live with it. They could both live.

The interview hiccupped briefly to a stop there, until Morrigan picked it back up again. "So... this... this AI, this guardian-thing -" she started.

"Justice," Anders interrupted, opening his eyes to give her a hard look, brooking no challenge. "That's what he is. That's... the closest thing he has to a name."

"So this..." Morrigan apparently could not bring herself to use the word. "His creators are all dead, and he's decided that we are his new masters now?"

Anders looked extremely pained at that. "He doesn't like the term 'masters,' " he said quickly. "He's... actually kind of offended by that."

"How else does he see us, then?" Morrigan said skeptically.

"Um... it's hard to translate exactly. The general gist of it is "the ones whose lives are short." 'Mortals' maybe?" Anders suggested, then appeared to have second thoughts. "Oh, and also "and who are in need of protection from those who are stronger." So maybe 'children' is a better word."

"Now  _I'm_  kind of offended," Hawke said. Nor, going by the expression on Morrigan and Cousland's face, was he the only one.

"Masters or mortals," Cousland broke in. "I'm satisfied by the events of last week that this 'Justice' means no harm to us. I cannot fault your decision in the Breach, nor your actions in the field. What I can fault, however," and he turned his stern mustache-framed glare on Anders, "is your incredible irresponsibility in choosing to keep this a secret! What were you thinking?"

"You have to ask? Most of the base was already convinced I was crazy!" Anders protested. "Even I thought, sometimes... If I started telling people I was hearing voices, what do  _you_  think they would have done?"

"Don't be disingenuous," Morrigan snapped. "A cursory neural compatibility interface scan would have revealed his presence. You refused every attempt to give you one. You were  _hiding_  this, pilot. Did you not realize the knowledge this... 'spirit' provides would be invaluable to the war effort?"

"I know that!" Anders protested. "Why do you think I've been spending so much time in R&D? I've been having Justice feed as much data into the computers down there as they'll hold. Morrigan's research is years ahead of where it would be without us."

Morrigan squawked at that, looking outraged; but there was a deeply intrigued expression behind it.

"He knows things about the kaiju, too - he watched them be made. I've been using his knowledge to help the pilots in the field - when I've been  _permitted_ in the control booth, that is," he added bitterly. "What more do you want us to do?"

Cousland and Morrigan exchanged a long glance, so much meaning in that silent communication that Hawke couldn't help but wonder if they had some kind of psychic connection as well. "When we've decided," Cousland said, "We'll let you know. Morrigan, let's adjourn this discussion elsewhere."

"Oh, and Doctor Morrigan," Anders called out as she rose to leave, her recording device stashed away in his pocket. She paused and turned to look at him, and he surprised them all with the small smile on his face. "Congratulations."

She actually  _blushed,_  and scowled twice as hard for it; she managed a begrudging nod of acknowledgment, one hand smoothing down the front of her lab coat, before she wheeled and marched out.

"Congratulations for what?" Hawke asked in confusion, once the two of them had marched out, the taciturn Sten in their wake. "Did I miss something?"

"Tell you later," Anders whispered, sending Cousland a knowing look.

Cousland actually cracked a grin, one of only a few Hawke had ever seen on his face, before his expression smoothed into the stern visage he usually wore as Commander. "We'll be back to talk again later. Anders, don't got far."

"What about me?" Hawke asked, raising his arm to wave feebly at his commander.

Cousland scowled at him. "Try to keep your clothes on," he said, before following after Morrigan and Sten.

He turned and left. Anders barely waited until the door shut behind them before he broke out laughing. "Looks like they know you too well," he said, chuckling.

Hawke sniffed. "Looks like they don't know me well enough if he thinks that's going to stop me," he said.

Laughing hurt like a bitch, and if the gravely sound to Anders' laugh was any indication, he was well out of practice; but it was still worth it. After a moment, though, the shared levity died away, and Anders was back to that awful, heartbroken look. "Are you sure you're all right with this, Garrett?" he asked in a small voice, chafing Hawke's hand between his own. "Are you -"

"I'm a little angry," Hawke interrupted him, and felt Anders stiffen up and clutch at his hand. "Not - not about the choice you made. I'm a little angry that you chose to hide it from me. You didn't really think I'd..." Hawke struggled to wrap his mind around Anders' fears. "Hand you over to be  _dissected_  or something awful like that. I never would. You didn't even trust me that much?"

"I'd trust you with my life, love," Anders said sadly. "But this was bigger than my life."

"See, that hurts," Hawke said, his voice cracking until he got it under control. "So I'm a little - a little pissed about that. But I'm not - disgusted, or scared off, or whatever it is you were afraid I'd be."

Anders gave him a pleading look. "Even though I have a creepy alien cyborg parasite in my head? You're honestly okay with that?"

With an effort, Hawke managed to raise his head from the pillow enough that he could look Anders straight in the eye. "Love, your creepy alien cyborg parasite just drove an unarmed, unarmored Jaeger into the face of a category five Kaiju to save my life. And then cut off a second front before it could get started, in all probability stopping us from losing this war, and saving the world. So yes. I'd say I'm okay with him."

Anders managed a weak smile, and ducked his head again; Hawke heard suspiciously wet breathing from his direction, and closed his eyes for a moment while he waited for the storm to pass.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he said at last, softly.

Anders slid over to the side of the bed and leaned over him, raising one hand to brush the hair out of Hawke's eyes. The expression on his face was wistful, full of love and yet unutterably sad. "You were the one bright light in Kirkwall," he said softly. "The only thing that made staying in the Shatterdome bearable, with all the memories of Karl, with the way everyone else..." He broke off, and sighed, stroking Hawke's forehead. "I didn't want to lose you. It was selfish. I'm sorry."

Hawke pushed himself up on the bed enough to press his forehead against Anders', eye to eye from inches away. From this distance Anders' eyes were a hazy pool of gold, shot round the very edges with tiny electric blue sparks. "You haven't lost me," he promised.

Anders took a hard breath, his fingers tightening where they framed the bones of Hawke's face; he could tell his boyfriend was fighting hard the urge to clutch, to cling, to put his hands all over every part of Hawke in order to assure himself they were still there. It was a ritual Anders went through every time Hawke came back from a mission, but he couldn't now, not when Hawke was inconveniently broken. "I thought I did," he said, his voice wobbly. "You were lying there in the water, all twisted up, and you were... so still... I thought..."

"Hey. I'm fine," Hawke said, patting his shoulder before gripping hard. If Anders was afraid to make a connection, Hawke would make it for him. "No more brain damaged than usual."

"Don't even joke about that," Anders snapped, anger flaring in his eyes as he pulled away. "That's not funny. You could have... you almost..."

"Sorry." Hawke bit his lip; he really should have known better. But if he wasn't constantly opening his mouth and letting inappropriate shit spill out, how would Anders know it was really him? "But I didn't. You saved me, love. You made it in time. Hey." He ran his hand up to the side of Anders' neck, caressing the frenzied pulse there. "I believed in you, Anders. And I was right, wasn't I?"

Anders made an unintelligible noise, collapsing next to Hawke to bury his face in Hawke's good shoulder. The angle was awkward; Hawke couldn't manage more than a truncated side-pet of his ponytail from here, but it was something.

"So," he said when Anders' shaking had calmed somewhere. "Make-up sex now, or what?"

It worked to break the tension, although Anders' incredulous snort and breakdown into laughter was not exactly the mood he was going for. "You have got to be kidding me," he said. "Do you need a reminder of just how many of your bones are broken right now? Here, I have your chart, I'll read it off..."

"All the more reason," Hawke pointed out quickly. "Sex produces endorphins. Nature's painkiller. Better than more morphine at this point, I'm sure. You're a doctor, you should know this." He waggled his eyebrows at Anders outrageously.

Anders made a scandalized noise, though he was smiling. "I was a  _pediatrician,_  Garrett!"

"Well, that's still... that's uh..." Hawke floundered. He blamed the drugs, he was not on his game. "Okay, I've got nothing for that," he admitted.

Anders just raised an eyebrow at him, and Hawke pouted. "Look, are we having sex, or not?" he whined. "I'm sure we can find some way, some position..."

"Not," Anders said firmly, pressing him flat against the bed with a hand on his breastbone. "Not with a freshly broken femur. Trust me on this. You  _will_  jar it and you  _will_  be very, very sorry later. You're just going to have to take a rain check on this one."

"You know, for a man who willingly invited an alien spirit of vigilante justice to live in his head, I would have thought you'd be more adventurous," Hawke accused him.

Anders only smirked.

* * *

The next few weeks saw them settle into a new routine, if an oddly foreshortened one from Hawke's bed-bound perspective. The security detail on Anders was lifted the day after his interview with Cousland and Morrigan, although he still spent most of his time in the infirmary with Hawke. Every now and then, Morrigan or Dagna or Herren would come to fetch Anders away for 'a few small experiments,' which could quickly run into hours or even overnight, leaving Hawke lonely and discontent in his cold hospital bed.

Not that Anders was Hawke's only company. He had a steady parade of visitors, once he was clear-headed enough to appreciate their company. The Shatterdome was in a frenzy of repair and regrowth, but the pilots at least were granted a reprieve - if for no other reason than there were no intact Jaegers for them to drive.

Although all the pilots had, miraculously, passed through the Battle of the Wounded Coast alive, the grueling melee had taken its toll on their mounts. Kirkwall Champion was totalled; Andraste's Fist was not much better, its pilots having ejected safely when the seawater poured in through the gaping hole in the armor, dragging it down. Guard Captain had gone down not long after, leaving Nature's Fury to face both kaiju alone.

The battle that had followed was nothing short of miraculous, Nature's Fury keeping both kaiju at bay with its crackling whips like a ringmaster fending off two angry lions. But the stalemate would most likely have ended in death if Aveline, forcing her Jaeger's hatch open, hadn't crawled out along the arm and forced the beam cannons to fire manually into the back of the unsuspecting kaiju's head.

The blast had incapacitated the one kaiju long enough for Nature's Fury to turn the tide, get the upper hand on its enemies and eventually defeat them both, but the Jaeger had taken heavy damage. While the day had left the Shatterdome with no shortage of heroes, it also left them with a severe shortage of Jaegers.

Thankfully, kaiju activity was down to nothing once again - and this time Morrigan shared in their optimism, as her readings showed nothing more sinister lurking in the wings. The Adversaries had apparently expended a great deal of carefully gathered capital on their last gambit, and its unexpectedly total failure seemed to have forced them to take time to rebuild.

Hawke knew that Cousland - and Morrigan - hoped to be able to turn the tables on their enemies, using Justice's unexpected font of knowledge to take advantage of the Adversaries' disarray. But, whatever they were planning, he wasn't going to be a part of it until his bones healed.

He got to hear more than he ever wanted to hear about the aftermath of the battle from Carver, who came to visit him on his sickbed several times. He came still in his rumpled uniform, drenched in the smell of the sea and less savory odors, and went on at great length about the process involved in dismembering and processing the bisected, dissolving corpse of Harvester out of the cove. Hawke suffered through it mainly because he didn't have a choice; he had a feeling Carver knew it and delighted in his unexpectedly captive audience. Usually he was able to get away from conversations about Carver's work by claiming urgent pilot business, a ploy which always greatly irritated his brother.

Hawke didn't understand Carver's fascination with kaiju innards, and even less his delight in telling other people about them. Hawke could be plenty crude, but Carver delighted in gross, and the more he could shock and disgust people the more delighted he was. It was one of many little things between them that had led them to mutually agree, once they were no longer forced to stick to each other constantly for survival, that they loved each other better from long distance.

Surprisingly enough, it was not the detailed description of kaiju gore but instead Carver's detailed monologue on salvaging the totalled remains of Kirkwall Champion that proved the last straw. For a change, Carver wasn't even doing it on purpose - he didn't think - but just hearing his brother talk about the way they had cut through the metal skin and sinews of the ruined Jaeger in order to render it down for recycling that left him feeling sick and hollow. Anders caught sight of his greening complexion, and chased Carver out of the infirmary.

Merrill and Isabela came too; sometimes independently, sometimes as a pair. They were quite busy being feted as the heroines of the hour, but they still found time to stop by and visit their fallen colleague.

Merrill brought flowers, alive and growing in little pots; dull green leaves and fuzzy stems peppered with tiny, star-shaped, pure white flowers that let out a pure sweet smell. When Anders expressed gentle doubts over whether the plants could survive, so far from natural light and air, Merrill had merely beamed and pulled a clip-on UV light out of her satchel, and that was that. Hawke couldn't deny, the little flowers brightened up the dull and often ill-smelling infirmary to no end.

Perhaps less traditional, but much more practical from Hawke's point of view, Isabela brought entertainment. Specifically, she brought a handful of issues of the penny-cheap, three-times recycled graphic anthologies circulated out of Antiva. They mostly featured filthy, obscene depictions of improbably proportioned men and women in compromising positions with many-tentacled kaiju, with poorly translated captions in Trade.

Anders took one look and declared them an abomination, which didn't stop Hawke from sneaking them under his covers every chance he got; over the next couple of days Anders started smacking him in the head every time he saw him grinning, without looking to see just what he was grinning at.

Aveline came by twice; once delivering a get-well card when Anders was away in a conference with Morrigan and then again after ascertaining when he would be there. Hawke watched with deep interest as the other pilot delivered a stilted, but sincerely worded apology for her earlier treatment of Anders, and grudgingly admitted that she had misjudged.

Anders was inclined to be rather acid about the whole thing, but he accepted the apology in a spirit about as grudging as it had been given; mostly because, he admitted to Hawke later, Aveline was probably one of the few in the entire base who was honest enough to actually bother to give him one.

Fenris never did make an appearance, but Sebastian did; he dropped by bearing an actual basket of fruit, a coveted luxury in their ration-straitened lifestyle, which he passed along together with well-wishes from his Tevinter comrade. Sebastian apologized for his copilot's absence - not that Hawke had really been expecting him; they didn't really have a sickbed-visit sort of relationship - and confided that Fenris was rather violently aversive to clinical settings.

Sebastian finished off the visit by giving Hawke a Chantry amulet and promising to pray each night for his swift return to health. The sentiment, while sincere enough, was quickly diminished by the way he turned a hard gaze on Anders and announced that he would also be praying daily for the health of Anders' soul. Hawke managed to chase him out of the infirmary shortly after that, mostly by threatening to remove his clothes again and show Sebastian his sutures.

(Afterwards, Anders rifled through the fruit basket with a rather sour expression on his face, then turned the entire thing over to Hawke intact with a grumble of 'typical.')

Varric visited the infirmary nearly every day, spending at least an hour keeping his copilot company. He was always good for raising the mood, with a steady supply of jokes and stories - he'd been the one to retell the standoff of Nature's Fury against the kaiju, with great dramatic phrasing and no doubt criminal hyperbole.

The only thing to mar the happy atmosphere of Varric's visits happened on the first night that Anders had been called away, leaving the two of them alone in the infirmary after dusk. Varric had apologized to Hawke for panicking when the water closed around them, for dragging him out of sync with his all-encompassing terror. He blamed himself for their inability to finish the fight, and for the severity of Hawke's injury, and for the first time in their partnership Hawke saw his friend break down in tears.

Tears left Hawke speechless and horrified, and with no idea what to say; he and Varric had always communicated in sarcastic banter outside of the Drift, and naked truth inside it. There was no Drift here, but Hawke still reached for it; held out his hand to Varric's shoulder and fumbled for the words to tell him that he didn't blame him, that there was nothing  _to_  blame; that Kirkwall Champion had been finished by that time, it had been so badly damaged, no matter what Varric had or had not done.

Varric nodded, and wiped his eyes, and managed a smile; then he dug into his back and produced a highly-against-doctor's-orders bottle of wine. The two of them sat and clinked their paper cups together solemnly, raising a toast in the darkness of the night to Kirkwall Champion, who had fought so long beside them and sacrificed so much in the end.

* * *

The next day was a quiet one in the infirmary; a victory party was being held in the H-M lounge for Merrill and Isabela. Hawke would have liked to attend, but his injuries made maneuvering too difficult; he couldn't walk on his broken leg, couldn't use crutches with his broken shoulder, and drew the line at being pushed around in a wheelchair. He suggested that Anders should attend in his stead, but the other man declined.

"I thought you got along well with Isabela and Merrill," Hawke said in surprise.

"Of course I do. How could anyone not get along with Isabela and Merrill?" Anders said with a snort. "I'm happy for them, really I am. I just… it doesn't feel fair, watching the two of them get paraded around as the heroes of the hour."

"They  _are_  the heroes of the hour," Hawke pointed out, and Anders frowned at him.

"Hardly the only ones," he exclaimed. "You and Varric were the ones who went up against a Category Five kaiju, without any functional ranged weapons, in order to protect the base. You damn well nearly  _died_  for them, Garrett! I think that's worth a party or two."

Anders was adorable when he sulked; Hawke smiled mistily and captured his hand to smooch, since his face was too far away. "We'll get our party later," he promised. "There's just not much point in throwing one for me and Varric when half the piloting team can't even get up out of bed to enjoy it, now is there? Believe me, the Jaeger Wardens never get tired of excuses for parties. Isabela and Merrill can have theirs now; Varric and I will have ours later; and you should have one too."

"Oh, well…" Anders looked away, his neck flushing. "I don't think a party is really appropriate when the celebrated party is still under house arrest, do you?"

"Then it can be a  _house_  party," Hawke said. "Come on, love, be serious. You went up against that exact same cat-five with even less weapons or armoring than Varric and me, and  _you_  actually  _won_. If that's not deserving of a party, then what is?"

Anders sighed, and surreptitiously tried to tug his fingers free; Hawke hung gamely on. "I don't know, Garrett, it doesn't feel right," he mumbled. "Most of the base doesn't even know what exactly happened. The footage is all classified. And they wouldn't want to… I'm not exactly the sort of hero they want to celebrate."

"Bullshit," Hawke quickly called on that one. "You're  _exactly_  the sort of hero we celebrate. You're a Jaeger pilot. The both of you are," he added, thinking of Justice, the strange alien spirit who lived in his lover's body, who hated the kaiju with a passion that rivaled even his own. Who was responsible for saving Anders' life in the Breach, and therefore, indirectly responsible for every moment of happiness Hawke had known in his presence ever since then.

Anders looked taken aback, but then a slow sweet smile began to spread across his face. "We are, aren't we?" he murmured, blue flickering in his eyes for a fraction of a second before it was gone. He leaned in, his hair spilling forward across his face, and his expression had gone bright and soft.

"We are," Hawke agreed, and  _finally_  managed to pull Anders down close enough to kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was originally going to have Anders and Hawke make tender glad-you're-not-dead love in the infirmary, but I realized that I'd written myself into something of a corner w/r/t Hawke's injuries. There's just no way they could have sufficiently enthusiastic sex with Hawke's broken leg, so I decided to add on one more chapter after a bit of a timeskip for Hawke to recover.


	7. Conclusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A taste of things to come.

Garrett Hawke stood on a catwalk twenty feet above the hangar floor, leaning on his cane. Canes, he had decided about five minutes after getting this one, were damn sexy. Or at least, they were sexy when paired with him, as were most things.

It had been a long eight months since the Battle of the Wounded Coast, and Hawke had seen far too much of it from a horizontal position. The water in his lungs had flared into bronchitis after all, just as the medics had feared; the resulting complications and debilitation had slowed his entire recovery to a crawl. With his injuries, he hadn't been able to manage crutches, nor maneuver his own wheelchair until Herren and Wade had surprised him one day with a motor-powered wheelchair that could be steered one-handed. He'd spent the entire afternoon chasing the R&D staff around the twisty corridors until Morrigan had thrown him out.

Gradually his lungs had recovered, his bones had mended, and months of laborious PT exercise with Nurse Wynne (who had the face of a grandmotherly angel, and the voice and manner of a drill sergeant) had finally restored his mobility. Hawke was just far too grateful to be up and about on his own power, at last, to mind the cane.

The long recovery had taken its toll even on his irrepressible spirit. There had been many occasions over the past eight months when he'd felt weak, and useless, and a burden on everyone around him; not able to fight, not able to pilot, not able to contribute in any way to the flurry of often frenzied activity that was the stepping up of the Jaeger Wardens' campaign against the kaiju.

Anders had been beside him every step of the way, never faltering. His presence never failed to make Hawke feel warm and valued, his gaze never failed to make Hawke feel beautiful and loved. But Anders couldn't be there every moment of the day; he had his own duties as a pilot to attend to, and long sessions spent interpreting between Morrigan and Justice to build up their working knowledge of Rift technology. There had been many cold hours in the infirmary when Hawke couldn't help but feel useless, passed by, left behind. It felt sometimes like he and Anders had changed chairs, and on the occasions he spent too long wondering about how Anders must have felt when he was in this same position, he wouldn't admit that he just might have cried.

But it was behind him now. He was back on his feet - well, feet plus cane - and gaining strength every day. He could walk from his quarters down to the hangar and climb the stairs to the catwalk, enough to gaze on the half-constructed frame of the resurrected Kirkwall Champion and wonder - not for the first time - what was taking so bloody long.

Technically, it was not  _Kirkwall Champion_   any longer. It was something of a tradition that when a Jaeger had sustained such injuries as to require substantial rebuilding, it was ill-omened to return to the former name. But if the human body could repair itself in just eight months, then all of the best engineers and mechanics that the Shatterdome could offer ought to have regenerated _Kirkwall's Triumph_ in half that time. 

He said as much to Varric, who chuckled and patted him on the forearm. "Give them a break, Hawke," he said. "They've had other things to keep them busy. We've just been too far down on the list of priorities until now; wasn't much point in getting her combat-ready when half her pilot team was still out of commission, after all."

Hawke sighed, but he knew Varric had a point. There had been Andraste's Fist and Guard Captain to repair, and Nature's Fury to rebuild from a destruction nearly as total as Kirkwall Champion's. From a tactical point of view it made more sense to repair the least damaged vehicles first, so as to have the most firepower up and running as quickly as possible.

And then, of course, there was their newest Jaeger project to consider.

Varric turned his pat into a gentle punch on the bicep, then leaned forward and crossed his arms over the guard railing. "It's just good to see you up and around again, Hawke," he said. "And even better to see you back in real clothes again, not those awful patient gown things."

Hawke didn't even try to stop the blissful smile that crossed his face at the memory. "Those were nice," he sighed. "Nice and breezy."

Varric scoffed. "Maybe, but they really aren't meant to be worn outside of the infirmary," he said. "And  _especially_  not to war briefings."

"I was still recuperating then, the gowns denoted my infirm status," Hawke protested. "And anyway, if they're good enough for doctors to see me in they're good enough for the Commander to see me in."

"Yes, well, the Commander didn't have to see you from the back," Varric sighed. "Not that it's anything I haven't seen many times over before, but -"

Their comfortable banter was interrupted by the sudden loud blatting of a klaxon in the hangar bay. All at once, the space below them came alive as men and machines swarmed into motion, following a well-practiced drill to rapidly clear the floor. Over the noise of the alarm, the roar of machinery and shouting of men, another sound was just barely audible - the grinding vibration of approaching Jaegers, their footsteps more felt than heard.

Not for the first time, a pang of nostalgic envy shot through Hawke from throat to groin as the hangar door rolled back and the majestic machines came into view. First was Guard Captain, as stolid and implacable as ever; aside from a shinier new coat of orange paint, you could hardly tell that it had been damaged. It lumbered past them without turn or pause, making steadily for its docking bay within the hangar, and the force of its step shook the earth.

In its wake came a smaller, sleeker Jaeger that was at once familiar and new. The shape and silhouette was still that of Nature's Fury, as were the pilots inside; but it had been nearly as badly damaged as Kirkwall Champion, and had required almost as thorough a rebirth. So the new-yet-old Siren's Fury paced past them, majestic as a sailing ship, its green-and-black camouflage repainted to green and blue.

Last among them came a Jaeger that was as out of place among the others as a greyhound among mabari - it was smaller (though still a good fifteen hundred tons of solid metal) more elegant, and just a bit fey in its design. Which, on reflection, didn't come as such a surprise; after all, not all of the minds that had gone into its construction were human.

Hybrid in every sense - between Thedosian technology and that of the lost world behind the Breach, between organic and electronic, between human and  _other_  - the new Jaeger was the culmination of nearly five months of intensive work and experimentation between Anders and the R&D team.  _Vindication_  it was called; the name broke the established pattern from Jaegers, but for this one it felt right, a single name for a single pilot.

(When the Jaeger was first nearing its completion Hawke had made several suggestions of his own;  _Booty Call_  as a homage to Anders' original Jaeger had fallen rather flat, and his follow-up suggestion of the two things he loved most in the world,  _Public Nudity_ and  _Little Anders,_  had not gone much better. Justice had learned many things about humanity since his joining with Anders in the Breach, but a sense of humor was not among them.)

Jaegers didn't need human faces or features, aside from the generally humanoid silhouette that made the populace more comfortable with accepting them as protectors - but this one had them, actual glass eye plates set into a visage like a winged helm. The head actually turned as Vindication walked, moving more like a living creature than a construction of steel and titanium - and when the glass eyes turned to take in Hawke, they lit from within with blue flame.

Hawke smiled. "Welcome back, Anders," he said, calling up to the metal apparition. "Hello, Justice. Good hunting, huh?"

Vindication altered its path, turning aside from its designated berth and coming to a careful stop before the catwalk Hawke stood on. It bent its neck down to regard him, and its inhuman voice filled the hangar.  ** _"Yes. Our hunt was a success,"_** said Justice.

The voice was so like Anders', and yet so different. It boomed around the hangar, drawing the attention of every elf, dwarf and human still with working hearing. Justice had lived for so long in silence, in hiding, that sometimes Hawke suspected the alien spirit was trying to make up for it. At least Justice had gradually learned not to overwrite every communications signal in the area every time he spoke, but he was still getting the hang of volume control.  ** _"We have met the enemy and we were victorious; we crushed them, bested them, scattered them to the winds."_**

Hawke cocked his head to the side, inviting explanation. "Still trying the zerg-and-swarm method, are they?" he asked. Since their definitive defeat at the Battle of the Wounded Coast, the Adversaries had changed tactics; new Breaches opened up every week now, all around the Waking Sea, releasing a horde of smaller kaiju rather than the gargantuan titans that had once stalked their shores. More conventional military forces  _could_  stand against the smaller kaiju - if not without horrific casualties in each battle - but it took a Jaeger to fight their way to the center of each attack, and only Vindication could seal the breaches thus formed.

**_"They are."_**  The blue flame of Vindication's eyes waned, then flared hotter.  ** _"Their tactics are without courage or honor, but all their treachery will not avail them. We are stronger than they, we are wiser and our determination is without rival._**

**_"We will be victorious, not just today but every day. We will not be deterred. Let them come again and we will stand against them, until the day comes that we can push them back into their cowardly holes and set the sky aflame behind them!"_ **

His voice shook the air, shook the walls, and nearly unstrung Hawke's still-healing legs; he usually had a quip for every occasion, but the sheer force of Justice's personality almost undid him. Varric swayed on his feet, and muttered something about how Glowy managed to deliver even better speeches than he did. Hawke just barely managed a smile and a shake of his head. "I'm  _so_ glad that you're on our side," he joked weakly.

**_"I would stand on no other side,"_**  Justice said seriously, as he always was _. **"I will protect you; I will protect this world. I will bring justice and deliverance. Now I deliver back to you what is most precious to me. Guard it well, and take heart from today's victories."**_

Vindication went to one knee, bringing its chestpiece down to almost-level with the catwalk, and reached up to undo the catches on the chest hatch as though undoing the buckles of armor plate. The cockpit door swung wide, and a human-sized figure pushed its way free of the cockpit and stepped down onto the hand. That hand stretched out, bridging the gap between Jaeger and platform, and came to rest with Anders standing on the metal palm, flushed and disheveled and weary, but smiling with his eyes bright.

The cane clattered against the metal grating as Anders took the step across the gap and fell into Hawke's arms, hugging him fiercely. The entire hangar broke into cheers and applause; every man and woman who'd been attracted by the commotion of the Jaeger's return, and captivated by Justice's stirring speech, now gave vent to their emotions in a burst of wild enthusiasm. Anders blushed hotly, bringing up his hands to cover his flaming cheeks and the beaming smile he couldn't quell.

Hawke reached up and took hold of his wrists, tugging his hands away from his face with a kiss pressed to the back of each one. "Don't hide," he told his lover, a smile tugging at the edges of his beard. "It's for you. You've more than earned it."

"Oh, well..." Anders couldn't stop grinning, couldn't stop the happy sparkle that washed from head to toe. "Justice did most of the work, you know."

"He did not. You both did it together." Hawke leaned forward, abandoning Anders' hands for the much more tempting target of his face. "Just accept that you're brave and amazing and you deserve this, okay?" And with that, he leaned forward and kissed him, wrapping his arms around Anders' back and sliding his hands down to his waist.

The kiss went on for long enough that the cheering and clapping turned into hoots and wolf-whistles. When Anders at last broke away, panting and leaning into Hawke with both his hands settled on his lover's hips, the blush on his fair skin was not at all from embarrassment. "Well," he managed, before swiping his tongue over his lips and swallowing hard, "If this is what awaits the returning hero, then I guess I'll take it."

Hawke grinned. "Damn right you will," he promised.

 

* * *

Hawke's cane had slipped to the hangar floor in the confusion, and it was something of an adventure getting down to retrieve it while the engineers were trying to get the now-somnolent form of Vindication back to its proper docking bay. Hawke wasn't entirely sure why Justice could possess such full control over the Jaeger while Anders was piloting, and yet be cut off from it entirely as soon as Anders exited the cockpit, but he'd given up questioning it. As intriguing as the idea of entirely self-piloted Jaegers might be, it was a little frightening, as well.

Anders half-supported him all the way back to their rooms, and Hawke let him. The amount of walking he'd done that morning had left him limping painfully, even with the cane, by the time they got to their door in the new wing.

The sharp increase in the population of scientists and researchers into the Kirkwall Shatterdome after the Battle of the Wounded Coast - as well as the abrupt expansion of their R&D department and manufacturing plants - had necessitated building a new addition onto the complex. Enough interest (and funding) had shifted from the Minrathous Shatterdome to the Kirkwall Shatterdome to turn the formerly backwoods outpost of the Jaeger Wardens program into nearly its new capital. With all the construction and expansion going on, they'd somehow found enough space to squeeze in some  _slightly_  larger living quarters.

Hawke suspected that the newer, family-sized suites had been built in no small part for Cousland and Morrigan and their new son, Kieran; but they'd also managed to snag one of them for themselves. The justification was partly that Hawke needed the extra space to maneuver during his recovery, but also that at least on paper, there were  _three_  pilots living in this room, not two.

Once the door closed behind them, and the cane leaned against a stand nearby, Anders fell to fussing. It was by now a familiar reaction to Anders finding himself in the spotlight; discomfited, he anchored himself by throwing himself into the care of those around him. If Hawke hadn't already known that Anders had been a healer in his former life, a doctor before he'd tested out positive for pilot compatibility, he would have guessed it from the way he fell so naturally into the role of the nurturer and supporter.

Anders had cared for Hawke during his convalescence with a patience and compassion that, Hawke had to admit to himself in darker moments, he couldn't possibly have possessed himself. He had gentle, sure fingers and a seemingly inexhaustible well of patience. Somehow he always knew when Hawke was in pain even when Hawke was doing his manful best to hide it - like now. Around Hawke's half-hearted protests he had his shoes off in no time flat, laid out on his side on the bed with a pile of fluffy pillows supporting his aching arm and leg. He brought a glass of water and a set of pills - not morphine, thankfully, but some weak garden-variety painkiller that had come to the Shatterdome along with all their additional funding - which Hawke took with a grimace and a mumble of thanks.

"You know, there's going to be a party tonight," Hawke started, hoping to distract himself from the guilt of taking up all Anders' attention. "For Isabela and Merrill, Aveline and Donnic, and of course you and Justice. You'll be there."

"Oh, will I?" Anders said, finally taking the time to strip off his own pilot gear.

"Yup," Hawke said. "I'll definitely be there, and I'd be sad and lonely if you didn't come keep me company. I just might have to seek company in someone else."

Anders snorted as he came over and seated himself at the edge of the mattress, turning his upper body to face Hawke sideways. "A likely story," he said. "Are you sure you're up for it? Don't need to rest?"

"Absolutely." Hawke projected all the confidence he could into that word. Anders wouldn't go unless Hawke went, so Hawke would go - simple as that. He'd regret it tomorrow morning, but, well, that was what tomorrow mornings were for. "You know me, I have a glory quota to fill. If I can't make my own, then I'll just have to bask in yours!"

He tried for light-hearted, and mostly succeeded - but apparently he wasn't quite able to keep the edge of misery out of his tone, if the way Anders' eyes softened was any indication. "Hey," Anders said, leaning in and raising a hand to brush over Hawke's face, down to cup his jaw. "Garrett. What's this about?"

"Sorry," Hawke said, rubbing his hand quickly over his eyes to dash the sting away. "This is your day - don't wanna mess that up. I just miss..." His voice faded.

"I know." Anders swooped down to kiss him, and well, it was impossible to be truly miserable through a kiss like that. Hawke shifted on his pile-o-pillows, falling back so that Anders wasn't stuck at quite such an angle, lifting a hand to grip Anders' shoulder. "But you're almost there, love. You're doing so much better than you were. You'll be back in the harness in no time."

"Yeah, I know." Hawke pulled a weak laugh out of somewhere. "Assuming the rest of you have left any kaiju for me to fight by then."

Anders pulled back, his expression shifting - a calculating gleam in his eyes as he briefly touched his lower lip. "You know," he said, a furtive tone in his voice that made Hawke sit up and pay attention. "This isn't exactly common knowledge yet, but..."

"What isn't?" Hawke said, interesting peaking.

"I overhear a lot, when Justice is with Morrigan down in the lab.  _Apparently,_  they're making plans for another march on the Breach... another big push against the kaiju. They're just waiting for the last of the Shatterdome's Jaegers -" he poked Hawke in the ribs, just in case there was any confusion what was meant by that - "to be up and running before they set a final date."

The idea caught fire in Hawke, burning out the disappointment and resentment, filling his head with visions of battle and victory - the chance to turn the tables on the Adversaries and strike back, push them into the Breach or beyond. "Really?" he said. "About fucking time!"

"Don't tell anyone," Anders cautioned him. "Not that I expect there to be any spies in the Shatterdome or anything but... discretion is key."

"Hey, I can be discreet!" Hawke protested.

Anders responded with a look of such naked disbelief that, after a moment of holding his gaze, both of them burst out laughing. "No, I'm serious, love. Not a word."

Hawke fell back against the bed with a sigh. "Well, I'm certainly not going to be doing any resting  _now,_ " he said. "You've got me all worked up and it's hours until we have to be at the party.  _How_ are we going to keep busy until then?"

Anders smirked. "So the thought of killing kaiju gets you all hot and bothered?" he said, reaching out to trail his finger down the center of Hawke's chest, down along the flashes of skin where the buttons left gaps.

"Babe, you've known me for how long?" Hawke demanded. "C'mon. Less clothes."

Stripping down didn't take long; Hawke was wearing loose clothing that was easy to manage without too much bending, and Anders had on only the thin undershirt and leggings that went under the pilot's suit. Watching him strip them off - such a familiar sequence, one he'd practiced so many times himself - reminded Hawke of what Anders had been doing just hours before. And who he'd been doing it with.

"I never know how to feel about the fact that an alien cyborg vigilante has seen me naked," Hawke admitted, as he pushed his boxer shorts as far down his thighs as he could comfortably reach with his hands, then lay back on the pillows to pull them the rest of the way down with the toes of his good leg. The shorts went sailing away somewhere else in the suite and Hawke watched them go, satisfied.

Anders chuckled as he came back over to the edge of the mattress, pulling his hair loose from its strict bun and letting it fall loosely around his face. "Garrett, remember that newscaster last year that you photobombed?" he asked. "Literally half of Thedas has seen you naked by now."

"This is true," Hawke had to concede. He stretched his arms up to fold his hands behind his head, and waggled his eyebrows at Anders. "So, how do I rate? He must have seen plenty of intergalactic cock, how does mine compare?"

Anders shook his head. "He hasn't had a physical embodiment since his race was destroyed, and they weren't even remotely humanoid," he said with a snort. "He's got nothing to compare you to except me, so even if he cared - which, by the way, he doesn't - you'd get a solid 'statistically significant.' "

"Oh come on, you're not half bad," Hawke protested, reaching out to run one hand up Anders' thigh.

"He doesn't care, all right?" Anders exclaimed. "He seriously could not care less about what he calls 'embodied mating rituals.' The only part of it that even remotely catches his interest is that you make me happy."

"And do I?" Hawke asked, his voice suddenly quiet. He knew perfectly well that he could be an ass, that his attitude could grate - but his biggest worry was that in his own self-absorption, he would miss signs of his lover being unhappy.

Anders' eyes softened, and he laid himself down on the sheets beside Garrett, reaching out to run his fingers along the contours of Garrett's body, up over his arm and shoulder to cup the side of his neck. "You do," he said softly. "You really, really do."

They fell to kissing and groping for a while, lying side by side on the mattress, half-buried in a cloud of fluffy pillows. The air between them heated, filling with gasps and panting breaths as they writhed and pawed at each other's skin. Hawke saw an opportunity and grabbed for it, pulling Anders' pelvis in line with him so that he could line up their cocks together and rock in tandem; Anders' eyes fluttered closed and his head tipped back, a breathy moan escaping his throat at the friction.

"How - do you want to do it tonight?" Hawke asked, his throat dry with the harshness of his breathing.

"Mm..." Anders' eyes slitted open again, and he pushed himself up on one hand, the other reaching for Hawke's cock. "Just relax and lie back. I can take care of you."

It was a tempting thought, since Anders always knew just what Hawke liked and how best to wring and caress it out of him; but Anders' hand was practically the only piece of him he'd gotten in the past eight months. He batted Anders' hand aside with a whine. "No, no handjobs! I'm sick of handjobs."

Anders sat back with a disgruntled huff, throwing his hands in the air with exasperation. "Who gets  _sick_ of handjobs?" he exclaimed. "Honestly, Garrett!"

"Someone who remembers the way your cock tastes and is aching to taste it again?" Hawke retorted. "It's been  _months,_  Anders! I want to feel you, I want to fill up my mouth and throat with you, I want you to come down my throat so hard that I'll be tasting you for  _days."_

Anders made a choking noise, his eyes growing wide even as his flushed cock jumped against his stomach. "...M... Maker, you're hard to resist," he managed at last, when his voice returned to him. He sighed in defeat. "Fine... as long as you stay lying down..."

"You don't have to be so careful with me, love," Hawke scolded him, pleased with his victory even as he obediently settled back against the pillows. "My bones are all fixed, the doctor said so, you don't have to treat me like glass any more."

"No, but if you get too enthusiastic now you'll be in too much pain to go to the party tonight," Anders said, getting up onto his hands and knees. "And I'm sure you'd hate that."

"...Vigorous sex or fun party," Hawke muttered in an agony of indecision. "Party or sex. This is a sadist's choice," he accused.

Anders laughed, a throaty sound that shot straight to Hawke's cock and warmed him right down to his toes. He flipped around on the bed so that his knees were level with Hawke's face, then curled up and scooted further down. "Come on, love. Like this..."

Hawke reached out and took hold of Anders' knee, hooking it along the side of his neck in order to spread his legs slightly apart. The vision that met his eyes from here had featured in many of his wet dreams, if from a different angle; the flat planes of Anders' stomach and the sharp angle of his narrow hips narrowing down to a tempting V of flesh. A tempting trail of auburn hair ran down his stomach before widening out, both pointing and framing the cock that jutted stiff and proud above the bowl of his hips. In quarters as close as these, the musky smell of him was thick enough that he could already taste it, and it made his mouth water for more.

He was jarred out of his admiration when he felt warm, clever fingers wrap around his own cock - just the sure pressure of it was enough to make him jump and jerk his hips - and then an explosive groan escaped his lips as the head of his cock bumped against an oh-so familiar set of lips. Warmth turned into heat, wet and searing and dragging waves of pleasure down his cock from the base to the tip with every swipe of that velvet-soft tongue and oh  _Maker,_  did Anders ever know how to give head.

It wasn't fair for Anders to be doing all the work while he just lay here, shaking from the pleasure; he darted forward and took Anders' cock in his own mouth, tightening his lips into a ring behind the head while the tip of his tongue teased a taste of salt from the slit. His actions inspired a moan from his lover that vibrated up through his groin and made his toes curl; it was a short-circuit from his mouth to his cock and back up again, and too easy to lose himself in the cycle of giving and receiving.

The two of them rocked together, wet sucking noises punctuated with soft groans and gasping breaths; Hawke very nearly lost track of time in the pulsing, ever-building bliss. He caught the familiar hitching of Anders' breath, felt the way his shaft swelled and jumped in Hawke's mouth, in the moment before Anders' hands were suddenly braced on his torso as he pulled back. "Wait," he panted, struggling to sit up; his hair was a mess, his face and mouth utterly debauched, and Hawke could only have loved him more if he'd  _gone back to what he was doing._  "Wait, wait, I'm too close -"

Hawke let his head drop back with a groan, Anders' shaft escaping from between his lips with an obscene  _pop._  "Me too! Why  _stop?"_  he demanded in aggravation.

Anders shook his head, his chest heaving with panting breaths. "This isn't enough," he moaned, much to the contrary of Hawke's direct and immediate experience. "I need to be close to you... feel you..."

Hawke pushed himself up, confusion washing away the worst of the urgency. "What about this isn't  _close?"_  he asked his lover.

"I need to..." Anders gasped for breath, his hands scrambling over Hawke's body, raking down his skin. "I just need..."

Anders was tongue-tied, rendered nearly mute with desire, but in an instant Hawke thought he understood. He'd felt the same urgency many times himself, after returning from a battle against the kaiju, the desperate need to just crawl inside someone else's skin for a while. He'd seen it in Anders' eyes after every mission, the compulsion to touch and taste and connect with every part of Hawke, to ensure that he really had come back alive and whole.

Because the last time, he hadn't; and Anders was still feeling the effect of that scare, even now.

"Then take what you need, love," Hawke said gently, taking the need for words away. "I want you, any way you want me."

The freely given permission let Anders get hold of himself a little bit; he was more in control of himself as he got up off the bed to rifle in their sock drawer for the lube, and careful when he returned to the bed and scrambled over Hawke's reclining body not to jostle him. Anders laid his body down behind Hawke's, spooning up behind him and wrapped his arm around Hawke's chest from behind, planting a kiss on the side of his neck. He urged Hawke's legs to part, to shift one knee up on the pillows to support his leg, and reached between his thighs with a hand slicked with lube.

Calmer now, Anders fell into a rhythm that rocked them both in tandem, like the lazy rocking of a boat on the waves. Hawke felt almost ridiculous with how little effort he had to put into this; there was nothing to take his mind off the sensation of Anders' fingers inside him, the coolness of the lube quickly dissipating as clever fingers opened him up.

Hawke let his eyes slide shut with a needy groan; there was nothing in front of him to see, and the darkness let him focus more fully on the sensations gripping his body. He felt too good, so good, floating on a sea of warmth and comfort as Anders encircled him and penetrated him. There was only the slightest of stinging, of stretch, tiny twinges in his leg and his shoulder as his body was pushed and flexed with each thrust.

Although he was still going to be tasting Anders at the back of his throat the next day, if how deeply he drove in with each thrust was any indication.

They'd both already been close; it didn't take long for the urgency to catch up with them again, quickening the rhythm of Anders' thrusts and driving moans and driving sharp cries from Hawke's throat. Anders' hand that had been gripping Hawke's hip, anchoring him, caressed the edge of bone for a moment before sliding down to engulf his cock in a firm grip. Hawke's pelvis jerked, and their rhythm stuttered; Anders' other arm around his chest pulled tight, pressing him back against his chest, and he pressed open-mouth kisses all along Hawke's shoulder and neck and throat. "Come for me, Garrett," Anders breathed, hot and moist at the nape of his neck, and Hawke lost it.

Anders' hand kept moving steadily through Hawke's orgasm, keeping up just the right amount of pressure through the waves that crashed over him. Once Hawke had come down a little, shuddering and gasping for air, he kissed the back of his neck again and picked up his own pace.

Floating on the post-orgasm high, Hawke closed his eyes and arched his back against his lover, enjoying the almost-too-much sensation of heat and fullness. "Anders," he called out, trying to go more for a sultry moan than a needy whine. "Anders..."

Anders gasped and bit down suddenly, his hips jerking slamming forward and holding on hard as Hawke felt the sudden pulse of heat within him. He couldn't kiss Anders from his angle, couldn't hold him; so he did the next best thing he could, unwrapping Anders' hand from its clutch on his collarbone and bringing it up to his mouth, kissing the palm and each finger individually.

"Oh, Maker," Anders sighed, collapsing against Hawke's back in a sweaty tangle of limbs. "I've missed this so much. Missed you."

Hawke considered pointing out that it was Anders, not himself, who'd been limiting their bedroom activities for the past few months; that wouldn't have been fair. Anders was only trying to look after him - care for him, protect him, even against his own occasional reckless stupidity. It was always that way between them, with Hawke tugging ahead into danger while Anders provided a more cautious counterbalance, a shield.

It was no wonder, Hawke thought, that an alien spirit of guardianship and protection had found its way to Anders; they were compatible, just like he and Varric were unified in their bloodthirst and savage eagerness to fight. But the differences between them were almost more valuable, in combination, than the similarities. It would take both to win this war - both the desire to protect, and the ambition to destroy.

There was no way to know yet what the future would hold. This planned assault on the Breach could be a grand triumph - or a complete failure, as it had been before. Hawke knew that it was on Anders' mind, haunting his thoughts and memories, the crashing defeat that had ended his piloting career and taken Karl from him. This battle could well go as badly, could well end in such loss.

Yet even in the debacle that battle had become, they had still brought something good out of it: Justice, and his bond with Anders. Even the worst disasters could birth a spark of hope.

It was for those sparks of hope, for these precious moments of life and love, that they would keep fighting. Not in the misguided belief that their life together would last forever - that they would never know pain, or fear, or grief - but for the hope of what each new day could bring. Victory would not come without loss, but it would come all the same.

Anders was asleep against him, or something close to it; Hawke tugged his arm a little further across his chest, wrapping his lover over him like a blanket, and closed his eyes, to await the coming dawn.

 

* * *

~end.


End file.
